6.8.08

homo duplex ... double double

Marshall McLuhan made two decisions in 1937: one was the spiritual strategy of becoming a Roman Catholic, and the other was the secular strategy, after intensive study at Cambridge, of translating James Joyce's Work-in-Progress (later given the title of Finnegans Wake in 1939) into an aesthetic anti-environment useful for countering and probing the cultural assumptions of a practicing Catholic. For the next twenty years he refined his understanding of, first, the Thomist concept of analogical proportionality as the expression of the tactile interval, and second, its usefulness in perceiving the cultural effects of the new electric technologies, through an ongoing dialogue, analysis, and sensory meditation on the nature of metaphor and consciousness (including extrasensory perception) as an artifact. Since McLuhan defined "metaphor"(1) as the act of looking at one situation through another, each situation constitutive of figure-ground interplay (a concept borrowed from Gestalt psychology), then a metaphor was an instance of mixed media, or two figure-grounds. And so was consciousness - because of its essential subjective experience as doubleness, which is doubled again as the objective effect of its autonomous interplay with other consciousnesses. Metaphor, for McLuhan, was hylomorphic...

Subsequently, with a view to “inventing himself properly,” both as a“serious artist” and as a Christian, McLuhan appears to have taken upLewis’s aesthetic, becoming a “duet in everything”:

"Vortex No. One—Art Vortex—Be Thyself"

You must talk with two tongues, if you do not wish tocause confusion.You must also learn, like a Circassian horseman, to changetongues in mid-career without falling to Earth.You must give the impression of two persuaders, standingeach on a different hip—left hip, right hip—with four eyesvacillating concentrically at different angles upon the objectchosen for subjugation.There is nothing so impressive as the number TWO.You must be a duet in everything.For, the Individual, the single object, and the isolated, is,you will admit, an absurdity.Why try and give the impression of a consistent andindivisible personality?You can establish yourself either as a Machine of twosimilar fraternal surfaces overlapping.Or, more sentimentally, you may postulate the relation ofobject and its shadow for your two selves.There is Yourself: and there is the Exterior World, that fatmass you browse on.You knead it into an amorphous imitation of yourselfinside yourself.Sometimes you speak through its huskier mouth,sometimes through yours.Do not confuse yourself with it, or weaken the esoteric linesof fine original being.Do not marry it, either, to a maiden.Any machine then you like: but become mechanical byfundamental dual repetition.For the sake of your good looks you must become amachine.Hurry up and get into this harmonious and saneduality…

It appears that in approaching both matters simultaneously McLuhanconcluded that the “serious artist” and “Christian” were required of theirrole, time, and age to occupy positions that were analogous — Neither“serious artist” nor Christian had any place as a member of society or itscounter-culture, yet both were required to interface with the world ifnot be at the very centre of their network and milieu. In brief, it appearsthat McLuhan saw that the artists drive to exile or alienation while alsohaving commerce with the herd, so as to enact some form of marriagebetween two psychic states of total immersion (Dionysian revelry?) anddispassionate survey (Apollonian concern with structure?), wascomparable to the traditional Christian paradox and “inescapablemodality” of secular life...

The difficulty was, and this is the crux of the matter, McLuhan came to seethat under electric conditions all former artistic strategies and thetraditional Christian modality of being in the world became problematic:Some feel that Christianity's existence must always stand in thetension between being in the world and standing outside it.Kierkegaard was keenly aware of this, as were St. Paul and, later,Martin Luther. But the tension between inner and outer is amerely visual guideline, and in the age of the X-ray inner and outerare simultaneous events.

In view of his survey, it appears that McLuhan took from Baudelaire hiscommitment to exploration and contemplation, from Lewis the chargethat reworking the vision of Dante would have to be done as the enemy,and from all the artists after Austen a commitment to detachment, notmerely a tactic, but a way of life and “survival strategy”:The need to retain an attitude of complete clinical detachment isnecessary for survival in this kind of work …. The road tounderstanding media effects begins with arrogant superiority. Ifone lacked this sense of superiority—this detachment—it wouldbe quite impossible to write about them. It would be like anoctopus attacking the great pyramids.

#BULLSEAR !

*impercipience of the ubiquitous*

You never step into the same data stream twice ...

Heraclitus ftw ! : *impercipience of the ubiquitous*

MIXED MARSHALL ARTS : The Visual Pun

Ted Carpenter : "Visual puns vary greatly, but all share one characteristic: each line simultaneously serves two or more images. That is, several figures occupy one space or one figure plays several roles in a single space."

The Story Begins ... when the book closes ...

Let all his faults sleep with his mournful chest, And there for ever with his ashes rest. His style was witty, though it had some gall, Some things he might have mended, so may all. Yet this I say, that for a mother wit, Few men have ever seen the like of it.

Un Kindle McLu

"The urgent effort of the poets to gain a hearing for their intuitions is always lost on the public."

HEADLINES AS ICONS

Andy Warhol : “Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, "So what." That's one of my favorite things to say. "So what.”

Thomas Nashe : Menippean Prose Poet

"What can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for."

POST-EUCLIDEAN GRUNGE

The chief mark of Menippean style was unconventional 'diction'. Neologisms, portmanteau words, macaronics, preciosity, coarse vulgarity, catalogues, bombast, mixed languages, and protracted sentences were typical of the genre, sometimes appearing all together in the same work. In outward structure, Menippean satire was a medley – usually a medley of alternative prose and verse, sometimes a jumble of flagrantly digressive narrative, or again a potpourri of tales, songs, dialogues, orations, letters, lists, and other brief forms, mixed together. Menippean topical elements included outlandish fictions (i.e. fantastic voyages, dreams, visions, talking beasts) and extreme distortions of argument (often ‘paradoxes.’)

As an active form, a Menippean satire goes to any extreme necessary in order to frustrate objectivity or detachment on the part of the reader ...

WINNIPEG SCHOOL

"Not your average 50 yard dash of funk" : The style of UM had been deliberately chosen for its abrasive and discontinuous character, and was forged over many redraftings. It was designed deliberately to provoke the reader, to jar the sensibilities into a form of awareness that better complemented the subject-matter. This is a poetic technique … of a high sort – satirizing the reader directly as a means of training him.

Ich bin ein Winnipigeon !

McLuhan once described Toronto to Ted Carpenter as "the cringing flunkey spirit of Canadian culture..."

will not be televised ...

"The new technological environments generate the most pain among those least prepared to alter their old value structures. The literati find the new electronic environment far more threatening than do those less committed to literacy as a way of life. When an individual or social group feels that its whole identity is jeopardized by social or psychic change, its natural reaction is to lash out in defensive fury. But for all their lamentations, the revolution has already taken place.”

"Synesthesia, the new sin of the nineteenth century, roused as much misunderstanding as E.S.P. today. Extra sensory perception is normal perception. Today electronics are extra sensory, Gallup polls and motivation research are also. Therefore, people get all steamed up about E.S.P. as something for the future. It is already past and present." Marshall McLuhan, Electronics as E.S.P., Explorations Magazine, Volume 8, Section 3, October, 1957

et cetera : LOVE [1977]

"The artist is engaged constantly in building anti-environments. (And, by the way, the Courtly Love people were engaged in making love itself into an art form.) The artist is engaged typically in creating situations and images that will vivify or revivify the ordinary scene. The ordinary scene tends to dull and numb the sensibilities. If you think of art as primarily concerned with perception and awareness, you can easily see why, when ordinary routinized forms tend to numb awareness, the role of art is to keep faculties alert."

Junkyard and Museum

From Cliché to Archetype (McLuhan & Watson, 1970) satirizes both readers and the effects of the phonetic alphabet – and hence the book form itself – in yet a new way. The book’s chapters are arranged in alphabetical order according to the chapter title. As a broad signal indicating what should be expected, the book commences with “Absurd, Theatre of the” and positions the “Introduction” and “Table of Contents” deep within. The last chapter, fittingly, is “Theatre,” a reminder that the entire opus, from beginning to end, is a staged put on.

MICRO PHONY

" Daddy, when do we start to get smaller ? "

"They that make them shall be like unto them."

"[We] must all become creative artists in order to cope with even the banalities of daily life."

- Marshall McLuhan, Report on Project in Understanding New Media xiv

PROSTHETIC AESTHETICS

see Cavell McLuhan In Space page 86 to 91

The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play

Does Humour Belong In Music Media Studies ?

McCLUE

There's no police like Holmes ...

"Outside I am Freer ! " - Wyndham Lewis

“A man of understanding is to benefit by his enemies... He that knoweth he has an enemy will look circumspectly about him to all matters, ordering his life and behavior in better sort.”

— from Plutarch’s Moralia

Communication is a miracle ...

but not impossible !

poètes maudits

Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century style of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) by Charles Baudelaire. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and '70s. During the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestoes and attracted a generation of writers. The name "symbolist" itself was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented the term to distinguish the symbolists from the related decadents of literature and art.

" allspace in a notshall " : ALL SPACE TIME IN A NUT SHELL

" Everyone has the right to protect ...

their own level of somnambulism. "

rubd + rubd

The Cut Up and/or The Fold In Method

Walter Glanze: “though I wasn’t based in New York until the following year, I believe that
the process was not unlike that followed in War and Peace [which I experienced first
hand]: Jerry would sketch out units, draw up questions, assemble and edit textual
fragments from McLuhan and other sources, as well as generating copy of his own, which
he submitted to McLuhan for approval before sending them on to Quentin. At a second
stage, Quentin added his own materials and touches, both visual and verbal, in the
process of roughing out page layout sequences which were then worked over with Jerry.
These were then submitted to McLuhan, who, naturally, had the right of final approval.”

Eric McLuhan: “As I recall, Jerry proposed the book and he and Dad worked up a list of
topics. That list became the head[ing]s in the book. Jerry started the list; Dad added to it
and revised it and so on. Dad then took the list and wrote a small essay under each
heading. I was present at several meetings between the three of them. Those meetings
always went smoothly and amiably. Quentin was quite professional about his work, not
the emotional artiste; so he was easy to work with. Jerry, too, was full of suggestions.
Consequently, meetings tended to become lively idea sessions, until Jerry broke in with
an item of business.”

" I am pleased to think of my own book The Gutenberg Galaxy as a footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and social consequences, first of writing then of printing."

You never step in the same river twice ...

“When information rubs against information... the results are startling and effective. The perrenial quest for involvement, fill-in, takes many forms.”

NO PASSENGERS ...

... ALL CREW ...

" The unexamined environment is not worth ignoring ..."

" The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves...You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing." - Socrates

ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD FTW : "It is the business of the future to be dangerous."

"The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur."

The first spoken word LP you can dance to

After publishing Mechanical Bride, McLuhan's lifelong project was one of finding new ways to observe interpersonal and intra-societal dynamics that are non-obvious and therefore, not readily observed. In other words, McLuhan sought methods that would allow him to reveal the hidden ground, or context of human interactions, despite the distraction of the figure – that which we obviously notice, and to which we pay attention.

We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence ...

of the Entertainment Industrial Complex ...

there is no such thing as bad publicity

"The only cool PR is provided by one’s enemies. They toil incessantly and for free ! "

I SEEM TO BE A VERB

Teems of times and happy returns. The seim anew ...

Ordovico or viricordo. Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle's to be.

CONCENTRATED ESSENCE

"...like DNA in a chromosome, each Thunder contains all the themes of its section in microcosm."

EGG-zactly !

" By contrast, a point of view is merely a way of looking at something. But an insight is a sudden awareness of a complex process of interaction. An insight is a contact with the life of forms. Students of computer programming have had to learn how to approach all knowledge structurally. In order to transfer any kind of knowledge to tapes it is necessary to understand the form of that knowledge. This has led to the discovery of the basic difference between classified knowledge and pattern recognition. It is a helpful distinction to keep in mind when reading Innis since he is above all a recognizer of patterns."

Symballein — to throw together

Innis changed his procedure from working with a “point of view” to that of the generating of insights by the method of “interface” as it is named in chemistry. “Interface” refers to the interaction of substances in a kind of mutual irritation. In art and poetry this is precisely the technique of “symbolism” (Greek, symballein—to throw together) with its paratactic procedure of juxtaposing without connectives. It is the natural form of conversation or dialogue rather than of written discourse. In writing, the tendency is to isolate an aspect of some matter and to direct steady attention upon that aspect. In dialogue, there is an equally natural interplay of multiple aspects of any matter.

Exploring the different ways in which Space and Time are perceived

One of Innis's favourite maxims : "the more the technology of communication improves, the more difficult human communication becomes."

SATAN IS A GREAT ELECTRICAL ENGINEER AND MASTER OF PUBLICITY

ANAMORPHIC MASSAGE

Optics. having or producing unequal magnifications along two axes perpendicular to each other.

Fluxi-Floco-Fluxus

Explorations 8 before it was shipped out to Dick Higgins at Something Else Press.

SPASTIC : A crankish, repetitive, and disjointed tome ...

The Pun as " nervous tic " : Too much feedforward makes me dizzy ...

Les Yeux De Nadja [unpublished]

" ... I have no theories whatever about anything. I make observations by way of discovering contours, lines of force and pressures. I satirize at all times and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the events to which they refer. If you study symbolism you will discover that it is a technique of rip-off by which figures are deliberately deprived of their ground. You do not seem to have grasped that the message as it relates to the medium, is never the content, but the corporate effects of the medium as an environment of service and disservice ... "

ASIAN MASSAGE

Drop this jiggery-pokery and talk straight turkey !

Explorations Five : Studies in Culture and Communication

Issue Five (June 1955) of the tri-annual periodical edited by Edmund Carpenter. Associate editor Marshall McLuhan and others. Contributions by Marshall McLuhan, Edmund Carpenter, Daisetz T. Suzuki, W.R. Rodgers, E.R. Rodgers, E.R. Leach, Rhoda Métraux, Roy Campbell, Claire Holt, Joan Rayfield, D. Lerner, D. Riesman, J. Tyrwhitt, D. Williams, Kenneth Boulding, W.T. Easterbrook, Jean Piaget, and Harcourt Brown. "Explorations is designed, not as a permanent reference journal that embalms truth for posterity, but as a publication that explores and searches and questions. We envisage a series that will cut across the humanities and social sciences by treating them as a continuum. We believe anthropology and communication are approaches, not bodies of data, and that within each the four winds of humanities, the physical, the biological and the social sciences intermingle to form a science of man." -- Editors statement.

Explorations Three : Studies in Culture and Communication

Issue Three (August 1954) of the tri-annual periodical edited by Edmund Carpenter. Associate editor Marshall McLuhan and others. Contributions by H.J. Chaytor, Kamo Chomei, Ray Birdwhistell, Martha Wolfenstein, Dorothy Lee, Kenneth MacLean, D.C. Williams, I. Potekin, M. Lewin, H. A. Innis, W.H. McCulloch, Marshall McLuhan, Anthony F.C. Wallace, G.L. Trager, and E.T. Hall. "Explorations is designed, not as a permanent reference journal that embalms truth for posterity, but as a publication that explores and searches and questions. We envisage a series that will cut across the humanities and social sciences by treating them as a continuum. We believe anthropology and communication are approaches, not bodies of data, and that within each the four winds of humanities, the physical, the biological and the social sciences intermingle to form a science of man." -- Editors statement.

Explorations Two : Studies in Culture and Communication

Issue Two (April 1954) of the tri-annual periodical edited by Edmund Carpenter. Associate editor Marshall McLuhan and others. Contributions by Marshall McLuhan, Edmund Carpenter, D.S. Savage, Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, Dorothy Lee, Donald Theall, Lord Raglan, David Riesman, Stanley Edgar Hyman, and A. Irving Hallowell. "Explorations is designed, not as a permanent reference journal that embalms truth for posterity, but as a publication that explores and searches and questions. We envisage a series that will cut across the humanities and social sciences by treating them as a continuum. We believe anthropology and communication are approaches, not bodies of data, and that within each the four winds of humanities, the physical, the biological and the social sciences intermingle to form a science of man." -- Editors statement.

no objection

" At present the entire mammalian world has become the microoganismic. It is the total individual cultures of the world, linguistically and politically, that have become the mammals, according to the old classifications of evolutionary hypothesis. It is the cultural habitat in which we have long been accustomed to think that people were contained that has become the mammal itself, now contained in a new macrocosm or 'connubium' of a super-terrestrial kind. Our technologies or self- amputations, and the environments or habitats which they create, must become that matrix of that macrocosm connubial bliss derided by the evolutionist."

FINN CYCLE

"If it seems to good to be true, it probably is" : A MEDIA APPROACH TO 'THE BIG CON' ...

" A peak in a poke and a pig in a pew " : When money itself becomes an irresistible form of arbitrary taxation, a situation develops which feeds the gambling mania to anticipate events by trading in futures and promises and "intervals." Again, it is the speed and "replay" of information movement which creates a new kind of pattern recognition which, in turn, makes it possible to see innumerable "software" gaps (information gaps) in the old "hardware" situation of goods and services. To fill in these gaps speculatively is one aspect of the passion for "Development," an aspect which has become inseparable from The Big Con. • The new economic situation, in which the game is to anticipate events at every turn and at every level, using the interval between the present and the coming events as if this interval were a tangible thing, this new situation in comparison with the older nuts-and-bolts economy presents a contrast somewhat similar to the "old journalism" and the "new journalism."

" I ALWAYS PAINT FAKES " - PABLO PICASSO

" Dictionaries drive words out of their senses."

FC2A : New means create new ends as new services create new discomforts

" Paradox is the posture of the mind when like a boxer balanced on two feet, it is feinting for an opening."

" mediatic a priori "

a “mediatic a priori” refers to “the various ways in which media ‘always already’ make possible and condition the production and circulation of information, knowledge,
and experiences in everyday life”

ONE MILLION COPIES IN PRINT ... Is that all ? !

" But, as regards to Tammy Thornycraft, Idefyne the lawn mare and the laney moweress and all the prentisses of wildes to massage him."

" x makes a y " : "Impovernment of the booble by the bauble for the bubble."

Material, Formal, Efficient and Final : " an explanation for how a thing came about ..."

The Man-Made Object

" I should prefer to de-fuse this gigantic human bomb by starting a dialogue somewhere on the side-lines to distract the trigger-men, or to needle the somnambulists."

Rejected MoM Header

' on theme but lacking the patina of legitimacy '

Objects may appear closer than they are

" Marching backwards into the future ! "

'florida or gravis' : SON OF AN ELECUTIONIST

Elecutio is the third of the five canons of classical rhetoric, the others being inventio, dispositio, memoria, and pronuntiatio : " Elecutio is mimesis mode ... that of "put on" ... "

A Further Message to the Fish Fresh out of Water

We don't know who discovered sufing ...but it certainly wasn't a fish !

PIED PIPERS [MARSH] ALL

" The user of any medium or any technology is the content of that form. The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on. The process of putting these on involves the reader in an imaginative exploration by which he discovers the possible extent and limitations of a medium. To the specialist or visual man, this put-on or play that is inherent in every moment of consciousness appears unreal, a sham. It is very easy for the Pirandellos or Genets to startle the literal-minded visual man with the evidence that his life is necessarily faking and making."

"What ruins mankind is the ignorance of the experts."

Analogical Reasoning 101 : For McLuhan, what the expert did not know and the questions he did not ask were the most important aspects of his expertise.

provocative hyperbole : "the greatest engineer who ever lived."

" Nobody could pretend serious interest in my work who is not completely familiar with all of the works of James Joyce and the French symbolists."

" Carefully make plans then do the opposite. "

" How are you to argue with people who insist on sticking their heads into the invisible teeth of Technology, calling the whole thing freedom ? : "and if young Nigel says he's happy ... he must be happy ... he must be happy ... he must be happy ... he must be happy ... in his World !"

West goes East as East goes West.

" The West shall shake the East awake. While ya have the night for morn ..."

BEATNIK GUEST SPEAKER ...

"When President Kennedy was newly elected, the editor of the Christian Science Monitor said to Philip Deane, 'We now have our first beatnik President.' I am sure that when I was chosen as guest speaker for this occasion many felt inspired to observe that 'We now have our first beatnik guest speaker.' McLuhan will not only show the relation between electronics and the Humanities, but between the small car and Bridget Bardot. He will take off in all directions at once, proving that since the disappearance of seams from nylons there is no value in lineality. The disappearance of the line in hosiery he will make to appear to be related to the disappearance of the chorus line, the receiving line, the stag line, and the party-line. He may point to the dread omen that no child would roll the hula hoop. He will probably suggest that skin-diving and TV-viewing are the same thing. That the teaching machines perfect the procedure of archetypal criticism. That the wrap-around space of the small car and the wrap-around audience of the new platform stage are not only the same form, but that North America is undergoing a massive Bauhaus program of haptic innovation which causes the leering teenager to spring up where before had grown the docile adolescent."

- from a transcription of a speech McLuhan delivered to the Learned Societies Canada conference in Montreal in June, 1961

McLuhan on Lewis : "environment as programmed teaching machine"

DEFENDING McLUHAN FROM HIS ADMIRERS ...

" 'Proper McLuhanism' is the anesthetic of the public. It is the ' McLuhan Admirer's ' excuse for a lack of perception ... They eagerly buy the Emperor's Old Clothes ..."

AMBIENT SNOB APPEAL : " GOOD TASTE IS THE EXPRESSION OF A COLOSSAL INCOMPETENCE ...

... It is the ' putting on ' of the genteel audience as a mask or net by which to capture ambient snob appeal. " - Through the Vanishing Point (1968)‎ page 45

POST TACTILE : the interplay between synaesthesia and coenaesthesia as hendiadys

" tactile" meant not so much the sense of touch as the interplay of all the senses ... "

"The new art form of our time is the media themselves, not painting, not movies, not drama, but the media themselves have become the new art forms.... I write cartoons.... I have wanted to write a play, for a long time, on the media. And the media themselves are the avant-garde area of our society. Avant-garde no longer exists in painting and music and poetry, it's in the media themselves. Not in the programs. Avant-garde is not in hockey, not in baseball or any of these entertainments. It's in the media themselves." - McLuhan, Forces Magazine, Hydro-Quebec, No.22, p.68, 1973

" I KNOW i'VE MADE SOME REALLY POOR DECISIONS RECENTLY ...

... but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal ...

No starch on the collar please ....

"Everybody knows McLuhan is a stuffed shirt ! "

Kelvin War Memorial

" Courage, Truth, Right "

ROOM 36

1928 KELVIN YEARBOOK

Home Room 36

1927 KELVIN YEARBOOK

1926 KELVIN YEARBOOK

Room 18

ENTER THE DRAGON : SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES ...

File under " Typhon, Monster Magnet, Android Meme" : McLuhan's (Unpublished) Guide To Chaos and Apocalypse ... "Typhon's human upper half reached as high as the stars. His hands reached east and west and had a hundred dragon heads on each. He was feared even by the mighty gods. His bottom half was gigantic viper coils that could reach the top of his head when stretched out and made a hissing noise. His whole body was covered in wings, and venom oozed as fire flashed from his eyes."

CANADA'S KING LEAR INHALING ...

Flower of Evil : " Oblivion is a healthy solution ... "

" SKINNY " McLUHAN

" guardian of the Right Wing ... "

" THERE IS NO SOLUTION ...

BECAUSE THERE IS NO PROBLEM ! "

OLD NEWS : MOORE MUD

Post Singularity : " We're back in Acoustic Space "

BLASTED

Counter-Environmental : 1914 + 1954

MCLUHAN FOR DUMMIES : Dumbing Down for WEB 2.0

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there."

HEYOKA : the Lakota concept of a contrarian, jester, satirist or sacred clown.

The Heyókȟa symbolize and portray many aspects of the sacred, the Wakȟáŋ. Their satire presents important questions by fooling around. They ask difficult questions, and say things others are too afraid to say. By reading between the lines, the audience is able to think about things not usually thought about, or to look at things in a different way.

Principally, the Heyókȟa functions both as a mirror and a teacher, using extreme behaviors to mirror others, thereby forcing them to examine their own doubts, fears, hatreds, and weaknesses.

"Tell him that I am a crossword puzzle ...

" My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. To remind me. Lff ! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! "

THE TURNTABLE : The Toy That Shrank the National Chest

SPIN control : all information wants to be leaked

The press by its very nature is “government by news leak.”

theoretic pre-commitment to technological brainwashing

"Ads seem to work on the very advanced principle that a small pellet or pattern in a noisy, redundant barrage of repetition will gradually assert itself. Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brain-washing. This depth principle of onslaught on the unconscious may be the reason why."

Mixmaster Marshall : Early Turntablism

The Toy That Shrank the National Chest : McLuhan demonstrates early scratching technique while DJ Eric looks dubious ...

Tonight's Topic : Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits

Monday Evening Seminar/Listening Party : " Everything we do is music "

" I thought we 'achieved' anarchy very completely long ago ..."

"... I didn't realize it was something that remained to be done ... And I think we're going further in every minute."

sigh ...

He : " Its simultaneous and everywhereatonce..."She : ( I wish he would stop talking about acoustic space...)

Gladstone School

Kindergarten to Grade 6

Red + Mars

Red : " My brother's work won't be properly understood for another 200 years ... "

Kelvin Clipper

High School Yearbook 1926

Winnipigeon : U of Manitoba Grad ...

Cambridge Bound ...

Portrait of the artist as a young whippersnapper

Double Whammy : 1937 was a pivotal year ... conversion to Catholicism and the publication of Finnegans Wake

Born in Edmonton ...

Methodist parents Elsie Naomi (née Hall) and Herbert Ernest McLuhan. "Marshall" was a family name : his maternal grandmother's surname.

THAT TIME OF THE MONTH ? !

THE BEGINNING OF "OUT OF CONTROL"

Flippertronics : 5 Channels and nuthin' on ...

Test Pattern : Percept plunder for the recent future

" CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BARRICADE " : "Joyce's FINNEGANS WAKE is an encyclopedia of lore concerning the origins and effects of words, of writing, of roads and bricks, of telegraph, radio, and television on the changing hues of the human spectrum... In fact, FINNEGANS WAKE is the greatest guide to the media ever devised on this planet, and is a tremendous study of the action of all media upon the human psyche and sensorium."

(D) Reverse the order of transmission as the "etherealized" sender
gets sent: you are there,and they are here instantly as discarnate minds.

“ the future of the book is the blurb ”

"Joyce's FINNEGANS WAKE is an encyclopedia of lore concerning the origins and effects of words, of writing, of roads and bricks, of telegraph, radio, and television on the changing hues of the human spectrum... In fact, FINNEGANS WAKE is the greatest guide to the media ever devised on this planet, and is a tremendous study of the action of all media upon the human psyche and sensorium."

HYPER MEDIA STUDIES

" Menippean satire is an ironic, fictional elaboration of systems of thought within a parodic, mixed-genre form that questions systems of knowledge by drawing attention to the discursive nature of ideas."

ITALIAN JOB : RUSH TO COVER

" Hello ... I just thought you should know that your roof is on fire ! "

STRAIGHT TO THE CUT OUT BIN ...

" the future of the future is the present and this is something that people are terrified of ..."

the 'message' of web 2.0 is that we're all Menippeans Now !

Cynic Satire vs Carnivalesque Satire : " As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological affair, "the techniques" of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes."

POSTPONED : McLuhan 100 @ ZKM : Opening July 2011

Exhibition + Catalogue by Gerald O'Grady ... with a full length book on McLuhan to follow.

CO - MODIFICATION

McLuhan, responding to a request to publish a selection of his writings on 'Education' wrote, “So far I have not had anything to say to educators directly. The gist of my approach is satirical – in so far as the satirical wrenching of the dormant perceptual life is educational, I might be squeezed into that category”

FROM GUTENBERG TO BATMAN

Annenberg School of Communications, April 28th 7:30pm

LIPPS INC.

Selected Poetry 1956

Holt, Rinehart and Winston (1956)

SKELETON KEY : "APPLIED JOYCE"

Don Theall : " The irony of all the complex contradictions of Marshall McLuhan's variegated career apparently is that he failed to successfully communicate the insights of contemporary poetry and art to communications researchers. Whatever else McLuhan was up to in his sometimes exasperating and often enigmatic writings, he developed a theory of communication which he considered to be "applied Joyce," in the same sense that he had analyzed Joyce as developing an aesthetic which was "applied Aquinas."
http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/download/531/437

" I do some of my best work lying down ... "

" To say that ‘the camera cannot lie’ is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name. Indeed, the world of the movie that was prepared by the photograph has become synonymous with illusion and fantasy, turning society into what Joyce called an ‘allnights newsery reel’, that substitutes a ‘reel’ world for reality. Joyce knew more about the effect of the photograph on our senses, our language, and our thoughts process than anybody else. "

The Community in Action 02.05.1969

More beanbag tossing 'mayhem' in the tent just outside the newly opened Centre for Culture and Technology ... [ note the undistributed copies of Explorations holding down the net contraption.]

Beanbag toss ...

Just one part of the zany festivities at the gala opening celebration of The Centre for Culture and Technology, U of Toronto : May 2nd, 1969

St. Mike's

McLuhan and Don Theall, on the University of St. Michael's College campus, 1955

electric simultaneity

“Under conditions of electric simultaneity the ground of any figure tends to become more and more noticeable. Perhaps it all began with cubism and the discovery that by eliminating the merely visual or rational relations between services, by presenting the inside and the underside at the same time as the outside, the public became totally involved and aware in a multisensuous way. "

PICNIC IN SPACE : The Great Minds of Our Time Film Series [1973]

" keep me in the apple of thine eye "

charge of the light brigade : "WITH IT" + "IN TOUCH"

Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium. With the omnipresent ear and the moving eye, we have abolished writing, the specialized acoustic-visual metaphor that established the dynamics of Western civilization. By surpassing writing, we have regained our WHOLENESS, not on a national or cultural, but cosmic plane. We have evoked a super-civilized subprimitive man. NOBODY yet knows the language inherent in the new technological culture; we are all deaf-blind mutes in terms of the new situation. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us by referring to the previously existent, not to the present. We are back in acoustic space. We begin again to structure the primordial feelings and emotions from which 3,000 years of literacy divorced

In television there occurs an extension of the sense of active, exploratory touch which involves all the senses simultaneously, rather than that of sight alone. You have to be "with" it. But in all electric phenomena, the visual is only one component in a complex interplay. Since, in the age of information, most transactions are managed electrically, the electric technology has meant for Western man a considerable drop in the visual component, in his experience, and a corresponding increase in the activity of his other senses.

ALWAYS THE SAME

" The prouts who will invent a writirig there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally. That's the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have occasioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects."

UNTWISTING THE TWIST

"The modern media are engaged in a Luciferian conspiracy against the truth."

"The new media are not toys ;
they should not be in the hands
of Mother Goose and Peter Pan executives"

The Aesthetics Of Silence

"As mime, the artist cannot be the prudent and decorous Ulysses, but appears as a sham. As sham and mime he undertakes not the ethical quest but the quest of the great fool. He must become all things in order to reveal all. And to be all he must empty himself... the artist cannot properly speak with his own voice." Marshall McLuhan, James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial (1953) in The Interior Landscape, p.31-2, 1969

BLAST ALL FURRY THOUGHTS !

TWITTER IS THE ANIMATED .GIF OF SOCIAL MEDIA

McLuhan 100 Conferences : " All obviously unimportant ... By the time you can get a thousand people to agree on enough principles to hold such a meeting, conditions will already have changed, the principles will be useless."

" ALL JOKES ARE GRIEVANCES "

" ... I have no devotion to any of my probes as if they were sacred opinions. I have no proprietary interest in my ideas and no pride of authorship as such. You have to push any idea to an extreme, you have to probe. Exaggeration, in the sense of hyperbole, is a major artistic device in all modes of art ..."

A TONIC TO “the hysterical imbecility” induced by the “mesmeric methods” of media and advertising

“I am an intellectual thug who has been slowly accumulating a private arsenal with every intention of using it. In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a lethal weapon.”

THE TALENTED INTRUDER

The 'tradition' of Canadian Vorticism starts here ?

ORAL MAN

" Oral cultures act and react simultaneously, whereas the capacity to act without reacting, without involvement, is the special gift of “detached” literate man."

" IT'S COOL NOT TO SHAVE ! "

" Low definition + High involvement ..."

OSTRICH STANCE

" Many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you're in favour of it. The exact opposite is true in my case."

" The nuclear bomb has turned warfare into the juggling of images."

" The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb."

AGENTS OF MOSCOW : TOILING INCESSANTLY AND FOR FREE

" Marx shared with economists then and since the inability to make his concepts include innovational processes. It is one thing to spot a new product but quite another to observe the invisible new environments generated by the action of the product on a variety of pre-existing social grounds. "

SYMPTOM + SEER

" We are no longer a part of the drama of alienation, we live in the ecstacy of communication. This ecstacy is obscene. " - Jean Baudrillard

Unless you've tried our embalming fluid, you haven't lived. ...

[ Ad in Casket and Sunnyside- a McLuhan favourite ]

" Assuary as there's a bonum in your ossthealogy ! "

Sheep In Wolfe's Clothing ... McLuhan's alternate title for Wolfe's essay " What If He's Right ? " : " I'd Rather Be Wrong. "

The experience with Wolfe held forth the pattern for future reversionings of the McLuhan myth by future pundits. Theall says it well. "Wolfe is indicative of what McLuhanism was to become, since he creates a virtual McLuhan, who will be re-created again and again, a situation McLuhan invites because, a pop poet, he is also crafting Marshall McLuhan as the pop poem. While others who follow may produce differing McLuhan’s, in a way they will all be different, as most of the varying exegeses of a modernist poem differ."

TELEVISION : POISON FOR THE SOUL

" The global village is not a happy place ... it is full of gossip, rumor, and personal malice ... As members of this 'village', we have to participate in events as they occur. We have to play roles in the global theatre or we become irrelevant."

The Bride Stripped Bare

More Hidden Ground re: Mechanical Bride : A Contribution to Anonymous History

metheg in your midness, this man is mountain and unto changeth doth one ascend...

"I'm not offering this as a self-contained theory; I'm making probes. Probes. There is so much here that hasn't even been gone into, I have no interest in debating it point by point along the way. There is so much that hasn't even been explored."

the put on

fixing problems that don't exist

" Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. "

GLI STRUMENTI DEL COMMUNICARE

"I experience a great deal of liberty here in Canada ... I wouldn't get that in the States, because I'm taken quite seriously there. The fact that Canadians don't take me seriously is a huge advantage. It makes me a free man."

Ihmisen Uudet Ulottuvuudet

" Yip ! How's thats for scats, mine shatz, for a lovebird? To funk is only peternatural its daring feers divine. Bebold !"

MESSAGIO

" an eye for an ear "

LA LUCE E IL MEZZO

" in twofold truth an untaken mispatriate, too fullfully true and rereally a doblinganger much about your own medium with a sandy whiskers? "

kaip Suprasti Medijas - zmogaus tesinial

" axpoxtelating, and claiming cowled consollation, sursumcordial, from the bluefunkfires of the dipper and the martian's frost? Use they not, our noesmall termtraders, to abhors offrom ... "

more Hidden ground [re:Bride] : the "flippancy" of tone seemed just "right"

McLuhan observed that our technological society [1950] vitiated family life and the free human expression of thought and feelings. The plan for The Mechanical Bride, which was to reproduce an ad or comic strip as an exhibit and then attach a short essay analyzing it, was a printed form of McLuhan's 'slide-and-lecture' series on the same subject; ultimately the plan was inspired by Leavis's Culture and Environment and reinforced by the use of similar exhibits in Wyndham Lewis's 1932 book The Doom of Youth.

SPOT THE LOONEY !

Carpenter : " Each medium, if its bias is properly exploited, reveals and communicates a unique aspect of reality, of truth. Each offers a different perspective, a way of seeing an otherwise hidden dimension of reality. It's not a question of one reality being true, and others distortions. One allows us to see from here, another from there, a third from still another perspective....New essentials are brought to the fore, including those made invisible by the "blinders" of the old language....This is why the preservation of book culture is as important as the development of TV. This is why new languages, instead of destroying old ones, serve as a stimulant to them. Only monopoly is destroyed....The appearance of a new medium often frees older media for creative effort."

mosaic approach to media

" Forget, remember! Have we cherished expectations? Are we for liberty of perusiveness? Whyafter what forewhere? "

CUB REPORTER 1930 -1934

Macaulay: What a Man! 28 October 1930. Public School Education. 17 October 1933. Germany and Internationalism. 27 October 1933. Germany's Development. 3 November 1933. German Character. 7 November 1933. George Meredith. 21 November 1933. Canada and Internationalism. 1 December 1933. De Valera. 9 January 1934. Not Spiritualism but Spiritism. 19 January 1934. The Groupers. 23 January 1934. Adult Education. 16 February 1934. Morticians and Cosmeticians. 2 March 1934. Tomorrow and Tomorrow. 16 May 1934.

“a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.”

" I have insisted that any new structure for codifying experience and moving information, be it alphabet or photography, has the power of imposing its structural character and assumptions upon all levels of our private and social lives – even without the benefit of concepts or of conscious acceptance…. That is what I’ve always meant by “the medium is the message”. - McLuhan Interview with Thomas P. McDonnell, U.S. Catholic, 1966

Q : how many structuralists does it take to screw in a lightbulb ?

A : By rejecting neo-Enlightment notions that privilege "light," we can conceptualize the relationship between optically-oriented envisioning and those signifiers that address interpretations of post-colonial modernism as an established text within the framework of which, intertextually, we are lead to reject any causal relationship between the operands and the motivators.

"Believe half of what you see and nothing of what you hear."

"In Eskimo, the word "to make poetry" is the word "to breathe"; both are derivatives of anerca--the soul, that which is eternal: the breath of life. A poem is words infused with breath or spirit ... Art and poetry are verbs, not nouns. Poems are improvised, not memorized; carvings are carved, not saved. The forms of art are familiar to all; examples need not be preserved. "

NO BASE

Carpenter from Eskimo Realities : " A distinctive mark of the traditional art is that many of the carvings, generally of sea mammals, won't stand up, but roll clumsily about. Each lacks a single, favored point of view, hence, a base. Indeed, they aren't intended to be set in place and viewed, but rather to be worn or handled, turned this way and that. I knew a trader with a fine, show-piece collection of such carvings who solved this problem by lightly filing each piece on "the bottom" to make it stand up, but alas he also made them stationary, something the carver never intended."

Charles Kay OGDEN : Add a Line More

HEAD START TO 'feedforward'

Inspired by the ideas of his teacher at Cambridge, I. A. Richards, McLuhan identified metaphor as a basic operating principle of communication technology: "All media," he proclaimed, "are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new form"

We were the first that ever burst, Into that silent sea ...

"For it was Coleridge as much as anybody who hastened the recognition of the poetic process as linked with the modes of ordinary cognition, and with the methods of the sciences."

ESKIMO REALITIES + acoustic space

In their co-authored piece “Acoustic Space,” Carpenter and McLuhan discussed how pre-literate tribal societies such as the Inuit primarily rely on speech in their interactions. Depending upon the harmonious balance of all five senses, such oral cultures exist in “acoustic space.” Such space “isn’t pictorial, boxed-in, framed: it’s resonating, in flux, creating its own dimensions moment by moment. It’s a world in which the eye hears, the ear sees, & all the five & country senses join in a concert of interweaving rhythms” (Carpenter 1972:31). When the phonetic alphabet was introduced, this allenveloping sense of space was breached and a more detached, linear perspective emerged—the eye, as opposed to the ear, became the dominant sensory organ.

FIRE HOSE

Carpenter : " Nothing could stop him.… I tell you, the ideas would just start pouring out. People used to shun him on the campus, because even though he was extremely friendly, when he would capture someone, it would be like a fire hose of the ideas coming out.... Marshall couldn’t stop talking. He couldn’t stop thinking. I mean, it just went on from one thing after another. You had to skip to keep up with him. And, of course, you can imagine the chaos that created in this conventional faculty in Toronto”

ÜBER GEEK

Clip On Tie + Flip Up Glasses FTW !(his dectroscophonious photosensition under suprasonic light control may be logged for by our none too distant futures as soon astone values can be turned out from Chromophilomos, Limited at a millicentime the microamp)

“If a few details here and there are wacky,… it doesn’t matter a hoot.”

At the University of Toronto in particular, the reaction to McLuhan’s celebrity was most intense. It got to the point that McLuhan warned his graduate students to erase any trace of his work in their theses and dissertations for fear of reprisals by their review committees. According to Eric McLuhan, “there were at least two concerted efforts (quiet ones, of course) to collect enough signatures to have his tenure revoked.” Such efforts would seem to put the lie to the shopworn contention of the academy that the rationale for the institution of tenure is the protection of freedom of thought; in reality, there is no more hidebound apparat devoted to thought control than the self-perpetuating survival of the medieval guild known as the academic tenure committee.

GAP - OLOGIST

" Mind The Gap "

BABA WAWA [TODAY SHOW, Toronto City Hall 1970]

"If you were a tree ... what kind of tree would you be ? "

Would you buy insurance from this man ?

If so ... he's also got some beautiful 'swampland' available ...

BUCKY MAKES TACTILE POINT @ THE COACH HOUSE

MMTV : "Colossal Environmental Happening"

CBC prepares to record Marshall McLuhan's "Colossal Environmental Happening" for Education Week. From left to right are Pam Wiggin, Howard Greenspan, Eric Long, Dr. McLuhan, Wendy Clare and Harry Crease. Students are from York Mills Collegiate. March 5, 1966

enter the dragon : "typhon in america" [unpublished]

" Where the hell is Zeus when you need him ? "

recipe for indigestion

" The Big Mac is the best plastic I have ever eaten ! "

" McLuhan Scholarship " is ...

... the sincerest form of autobiography.

Television is not a visual medium : " I don't explain — I explore "

" The global village is full of gossip, rumor, and personal malice..."

COMMUNICATION IS A MIRACLE BUT NOT IMPOSSIBLE.

We live under the delusion that communication is a common occurrence when actually it is rare in human affairs and that we naïvely complain when we perceive a lack of it ...

DEFINITELY NOT THE PREFACE !

WE APOLOGIZE FOR THIS PREFACE ...

Please accept our apologies for this PREFACE ... however ... it is not the 'real' Preface ... We have temporarily misplaced " the real " Preface (or perhaps our dog has eaten it) ... We will email you immediately once we find it ... Sorry !

a priest in jester's clothing : "I found the book very dull and confused."

Snarkiness + Snide Tone : " McLuhan often approaches areas with the stance of the huckster, the techniques of the propagandist and the strategies of the con man ... McLuhan's methods of extrapolation are questionable, he trivializes important methods of discovery, allows for fallacy and his conclusions are often too facile."

" In art the importance of the same principle is illustrated by the value of suggestion. In leaving something unsaid the beholder is given a chance to complete the idea.. .until you seem to become actually part of it."

las extensiones del ser humanos

BLAST FIRST !

" fraternizing with monkeys " : " to even begin to try to tell the truth today is already a satirical activity ... "

NUMB AND NUMB-ER

pass the soap : ENGRISH

As an active form, a Menippean satire goes to any extreme necessary in order to frustrate objectivity or detachment on the part of the reader. … Cynics, and Diogenes in particular … were often referred to as ‘laughing philosophers,’ for they refused to take seriously any political, private, social, intellectual, or other kind of pretentiousness

PULP FRICTION

"The masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb."

" I GO AGAINST THE GRAIN ..."

Two years less a day for 'colouring outside the lines"...

do the dew

" the artist is always a jump ahead ..."

Probe as teaser : icon_in progress

" the medium I employ is the probe not the package "

STRANGE LOOP

soup is anything you can get away with

" It's the environment stupid ! "

F.Z.O.O.Q.

“Menippean form … both celebrates the playfulness of the amateur and the seriousness of the scholar. Menippean satire is a scholar’s literature, replete with the sort of inside jokes that can only be understood within a community of shared knowledge”

SOCK IT TO ME !!!

Veh-ddy Eeen-tar-esting !

URINAL

PARA-McLuhan

what happens when an ideology backed by corporate wealth + power confronts inconvenient facts ?

Answer : '' the facts '' lose.

FIELD MARSHALL : causae ad invicerm cassae sunt

Sign on the wall at The Coach House : INFORM ALL THE TROOPS THAT COMMUNICATIONS HAVE COMPLETELY BROKEN DOWN ! ...

Cambridge 1934

" Everybody writes books here,’ he told his mother, ‘not many of them worth reading either."

Trinity Hall Rowing Team 1936

Trinity Hall Boat Club (also known as THBC) is the rowing club of Trinity Hall, a college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1827 it is amongst the oldest college boat clubs in Cambridge, England. Nickname : "Black and White army" ... Motto : "Our power's a crescent".

en francais

Conversations avec Jean Paré 1966-1973

A very complicated way of saying 'appearances deceive'

Pound portrait sketch by Wyndham Lewis

The "extremely important message" was "Please BUY this Magazine !"

" Relativity theory in 1905 announced the dissolution of uniform Newtonian space as an illusion or fiction, however useful. Einstein pronounced the doom of continuous or "rational" space, and the way was made clear for Picasso and the Marx brothers and MAD Magazine."

An agent of screwball subversion : " MAD magazine instilled in me a habit of mind, a way of thinking about a world rife with false fronts, small print, deceptive ads, booby traps, treacherous language, double standards, half truths, subliminal pitches and product placements; it warned me that I was often merely the target of people who claimed to be my friend; it prompted me to mistrust authority, to read between the lines, to take nothing at face value, to see patterns in the often shoddy construction of movies and TV shows; and it got me to think critically in a way that few actual humans charged with my care ever bothered to."

Three-Pronged Poiuyt

"ten pounds of manure in a five pound bag"

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

DISINFOTAINMENT + ITS POST INFORMATION DISCONTENTS

Michael Moore : We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a WikiLeaks to deal with. They might not have been able to pull it off. The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy. That guarantee has now been ripped from them, and I hope they are never able to operate in secret again.

So why is WikiLeaks, after performing such an important public service, under such vicious attack? Because they have outed and embarrassed those who have covered up the truth.

But some in the corporate-owned press have dismissed the importance of WikiLeaks ("they've released little that's new!") or have painted them as simple anarchists ("WikiLeaks just releases everything without any editorial control!"). WikiLeaks exists, in part, because the mainstream media has failed to live up to its responsibility. The corporate owners have decimated newsrooms, making it impossible for good journalists to do their job. There's no time or money anymore for investigative journalism. Simply put, investors don't want those stories exposed. They like their secrets kept ... as secrets.

What if the public in 2003 had been able to read "secret" memos from Dick Cheney as he pressured the CIA to give him the "facts" he wanted in order to build his false case for war? If a WikiLeaks had revealed at that time that there were, in fact, no weapons of mass destruction, do you think that the war would have been launched -- or rather, wouldn't there have been calls for Cheney's arrest?

Might WikiLeaks cause some unintended harm to diplomatic negotiations and U.S. interests around the world? Perhaps. But that's the price you pay when you and your government take us into a war based on a lie. Your punishment for misbehaving is that someone has to turn on all the lights in the room so that we can see what you're up to. You simply can't be trusted. So every cable, every email you write is now fair game. Sorry, but you brought this upon yourself. No one can hide from the truth now. No one can plot the next Big Lie if they know that they might be exposed.

WORKING TITLE

"Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude ..."

BLESS PINK AIR

" All advertising advertises advertising "

thunder word verification

Disincentive to comment ...

warp speed

If you want to understand acoustic space and the digital world we live in, Marshall McLuhan says to watch the original 1977 Star Wars: “at the exact moment Solo puts his spaceship into warp speed or ‘Hyper-Space,’ all those pinpoints of light stand still. He’s travelling faster than the Speed of Light, and thus the space freighter becomes simultaneous and everywhere at once—the properties of acoustic space.”

X = signature

"Too much of anything, however sweet, will always bring the opposite of what you thought you were getting."

scanning page 69 of a dozen books

Do Not Disturb : Grammarian in action [Coach House Office 1978]

program or be programmed

The consequent process of archetypalisation of Nature ensures that the Earth is now an old "booster-stage"... a quaint form of Camp... a sort of archaeological museum affording immediate access to all past cultures simultaneously on a classified-information basis.

THE SATELLITE DECIDES FOR US THAT OUR FUTURE RELATION TO THE PLANET IS ONE OF "PROGRAM".DEW-Line Newsletter, Vol.1, #5, Nov.1968

Take Today [1972] : "the consumer becomes a producer..."

"My consumers, are they not my producers ..."

dustjacket flap

joyce into mcluhan

rotate 180 degrees and ... change the colours

dog-eared

" In cars, clothes, in paperback books; in beards, babies and beehive hairdos, the American has declared for stress on touch, on participation, involvement, and sculptural values. America, once the land of an abstractly visual order, is profoundly "in touch" again with European traditions of food and life and art . .. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind."

Q + A

Q – Do you consider yourself an artist? MM – Entirely. Always have been. Nothing else. Q – Then why the doctorate and academe? MM – I have never attempted to win the respect of my colleagues. I go against the grain. Q – If people accept your insights? MM – I would panic. I would assume they lost their noodle.

McLuhan effectively concludes the interview, going on to note that so long as he is violently disapproved of, "I am on the right course."

discordian times

45 rpm

24 frames per second

"Light does not have a point of view; it radiates in all directions at once, giving it a spherical, auditory character."

media tricksters : a (barely) " tolerated margin of mess."

"Canadians are all a very humble bunch. They take it for granted that everything they do must be second rate. Carpenter and I just blithely assumed that, since nearly everything in the world is second rate at best, there was no reason why we couldn't do something that was first rate right here."

Post Euclidean Space has a 'centre without margins'

"Acoustic space" as a McLuhan percept originally emerged from the description of "auditory space" in the behavioural psychology of E.A. Bott of the University of Toronto, which was brought to McLuhan's attention by a colleague in the Ford Foundation Culture and Communication seminars, psychologist Karl Williams. Bott's idea, that auditory space "has no centre or no margins since we hear from all directions simultaneously," immediately attracted McLuhan, who had already been immersed in then-contemporary writers concerned with space, including art and architecture historian Sigfried Giedion, visual artist and designer Laszlo Mohly-Nagy and classicist Francis Cornford, author of "The Invention of Space." With Ted Carpenter, co-founder of the seminars and of the early multidisciplinary journal Explorations, McLuhan gradually expanded the idea of auditory space, christening it "acoustic space" to dramatize its abstract nature. Carpenter contributed Aboriginal, especially Inuit, conceptions of an acoustic space; McLuhan worked out its relation to the contemporary arts and poetry affected by four-dimensional geometry and the new physics.

" my canvasses are surrealist ...

... and to call them "theories" is to miss my satirical intent altogether."

THE YEGG

"I don't know what is inside (the vault); maybe it's nothing. I just sit and start to work. I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences - until the tumblers fall and the door springs open."

the most dangerous transparency in america

Ellsberg: “EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.”

McLuhan's toolkit

McLuhan's toolkit includes a firm knowledge of the entire written tradition, the translatio studii, from Homer to the present. Add to that a firm knowledge of the Trivium (Rhetoric, Dialectic and Grammar), an extensive knowledge of English Literature, prose and poetry, a profound knowledge of the English language, an immense vocabulary, and a deep and abiding curiosity about etymology, nourished by a knowledge of French, Latin, German, Greek, etc. The aphoristic style, learned from Bacon and from modern ad-men, provided much more than a way of expressing things. It supplied a way of thinking in outlines and seeing whole structures. Being able to perform traditional multi-level exegesis made short work of assessing complexity in prose and verse, old and new, and gave swift entry into a range of texts. Equally, long practice with Practical Criticism meant a quick and sure means of entry into any human “text” product or service.

Practical Criticism ... the ideal Grammarian’s tool !

Practical Criticism is not theory-based. It is performance-based. ... Practical Criticism relies on observation and critical judgment — learned skills ... Without a theory as a guide McLuhan was influenced by artists and poets in developing the analytical and conceptual tools he relied upon to examine media and communication. He referred to his procedure as starting with a problem and digging into the toolkit for something to open the matter up for elucidation. Chief among his tools of analysis was Practical Criticism, which he viewed as a kind of critic’s Swiss-Army Knife that worked equally incisively across all of the arts and through all areas of culture, from high-brow to low. The argument that emerges from this analysis of McLuhan’s investigative techniques is that many of the conundrums of modern media and culture are understood most effectively through research that transcends the constraints imposed by seeking to make the case for or against the truth of a particular theory. Begin with theory, you begin with the answer; begin with observation, you begin with questions.

straight to the cutout bin : only 4000 sold ...

Originally delivered as a massive 600 page collage/manuscript ... "chopped" down to 300 by the 'clueless' publisher who described it as "deliberately obtuse".

META EDIT

" There's not a problem I can't fix, 'cause I can do it in the mix "

EAT THAT QUESTION : THE AESTHETICS OF CYNIC SATIRE

Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best...

“It is perhaps typical of very creative minds that they hit very large nails not quite on the head.”

" ALL NEWS IS FAKE ! " - Marshall McLuhan

" Journalism is anything you can get away with."

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

" See the problem isn't that WikiLeaks is lying, the problem is that they're telling the truth. "

BACKWARD MASKED MESSAGE delivered via bit torrent

Dr. Brian Oblivion : " Your reality is already HALF video hallucination. If you're not careful, it will become TOTAL hallucination. You'll have to learn to live in a very strange new world. "

zombie stance of the technological idiot

Because of today's terrific speed-up of information moving, we have a chance to apprehend, predict and influence the environmental forces shaping us--and thus win back control of our own destinies. The new extensions of man and the environment they generate are the central manifestations of the evolutionary process, and yet we still cannot free ourselves of the delusion that it is how a medium is used that counts, rather than what it does to us and with us. This is the zombie stance of the technological idiot. It's to escape this Narcissus trance that I've tried to trace and reveal the impact of media on man, from the beginning of recorded time to the present.

vicociclometer : A Downwards Parabola into Sleep

"Tys Elvenland ! Teems of times and happy returns. The seim anew. Ordovico or viricordo."

420

"TV intensifies the already numerous forms of inner-tripping. Colour TV is psychedelic input. The kids are simply putting jam on jam when they take to drugs. ... In the 20's booze created a huge police state as we tried to prop up the old form of social arrangements. Drugs likewise provide a field-day for the Mafia as we try to maintain the patterns of the pre-electric age while the kids are miming electric speeds and the externalization of their nervous systems created by electric circuitry"

a short cut into the electric vortex

The upsurge in drug taking is intimately related to the impact of the electric media. Look at the metaphor for getting high: turning on. One turns on his consciousness through drugs just as he opens up all his senses to a total depth involvement by turning on the TV dial. Drug taking is stimulated by today's pervasive environment of instant information, with its feedback mechanism of the inner trip. The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it's the universal experience of TV watchers. LSD is a way of miming the invisible electronic world; it releases a person from acquired verbal and visual habits and reactions, and gives the potential of instant and total involvement, both all-at-onceness and all-at-oneness, which are the basic needs of people translated by electric extensions of their central nervous systems out of the old rational, sequential value system. The attraction to hallucinogenic drugs is a means of achieving empathy with our penetrating electric environment, an environment that in itself is a drugless inner trip.

Mikhail Bakhtin, Russian literary theorist and critic

Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian literary theorist and critic, identified fourteen distinct characteristics that are typical of Menippean satire throughout the ages. These include a comic or “carnival” element; freedom from accuracy with inventive plots and philosophical approaches; absurd situations used to seek, reveal, and test the truth of ideas rather than the human character; altered observational standpoints or states of consciousness that enable new perspectives on situations and life; deliberate violations of social conventions to create new awareness of old forms; mixed media forms and genres in which the medium itself assumes a significance beyond its content; and a heightened concern for contemporary issues and salient topics of the day.

spoudogeloion : A CONSCIOUS STRATEGY OF PARODIC CANNABALISM

Carnivalesque is a term which refers to a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos.

CRYPTIC TRICKSTERS

the “cynic effect” – a satirical response that creates new awareness by awakening the dulled perception of the reader. Thus, Menippean satire is not merely humour or irony, but humour or irony with a specific intentionality.

CTRL > ALT > C

" All information wants to be downloaded "

NEW MEDIA creates NEW 'NEWS', NEW SPEEDS, NEW RELATIONSHIPS, NEW PATTERNS

“A spectacular paradigm of the information revolution has been developed for the world at large by the Watergate affair. While it seems to specialize in matters of political espionage and image- building, it also draws attention to the fact that the entire educational and commercial establishments, as much as the political and military establishments, depend on data banks of total information concerning both producers and consumers, both the governors and the governed. The Watergate affair makes it quite plain that the entire planet has become a whispering gallery, with a large portion of mankind engaged in making its living by keeping the rest of mankind under surveillance. The FBI includes among its responsibilities keeping under surveillance individual members of the CIA. We thus have a complete scheme of baby-sitters for the baby-sitters — chaperons for chaperons — and it is the business of every commercial establishment to keep all other commercial establishments under surveillance as a minimal condition of survival.”

“Position papers are secret or confidential documents for the attention of committees, and any office boy can publish these, no matter how top secret they may be. The Pentagon Papers were position papers which may or may not have been studied or discussed by a Congressional committee. They are “the news behind the news”, which used to be considered muckraking but has now become an ordinary dimension of journalism, such as nourishes the underground press and which, in turn, affects the forms and publics of the regular press. What has happened since the old muckraking days of the 1920′s is that espionage, whether political or commercial, has become the largest business in the world, and we take it for granted that the modern newspaper depends on “bugging” the whole community. In fact, we expect the press to “bug” the world and to challenge and penetrate all privacy and identity, whether private or corporate.”

Ww3 will be a global information war with no division between civilian and military participation

The true significance of Wikileaks lies not in " THE CONTENT " of the latest document dump but in THE MEDIUM [ ie. the global information technology environment ] that made it possible, which has already shown itself to be a potent weapon to undermine official lies, expose abuses and defend human rights.

The WikiLeaks story is the first time we have seen 'the international community' attempt to censor a website dedicated to the principle of transparency.

DOUBLE TAKE : out and safe !

“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.”

CANADIANS = GOAL-LESS SLACKERS

" Having no national identity, Canada has never had any goals ... That's why Canada is not as frustrated and therefore not as aggressive as most countries..."

A CRITICS SWISS ARMY KNIFE : GRAMMATICA MAKES A COMEBACK

At St. Louis, McLuhan believed that he, virtually single handed, was pioneering the techniques of Richards, Empson and Leavis in the United States."

post-information studies : WIKILEAKS

" All Information wants to be free ... "" All Information wants to be ' leaked ' ... "

INSIDE THE FIREWALL

The 22 year old was described by former classmates as a "trouble-making, authority-hating computer geek"

" Manning : I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like "Lady Gaga"… erase the music… then write a compressed split file ... no-one suspected a thing ... perfect example of how not to do INFOSEC ... listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga's Telephone while exfiltratrating possibly the largest data spillage in american history ... pretty simple, and unglamorous ... weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis … a perfect storm."

THE WELL ADJUSTED MAN IS A ROBOT !

" Conformity, Adaptability, Somnambulism ! "

Grammarian Tool Kit

"I should prefer to de-fuse this gigantic human bomb by starting a dialogue somewhere on the side-lines to distract the trigger-men, or to needle the somnambulists." - Marshall McLuhan 1955

WEB 3.0 : " We are the genitals of our technology. We exist only to improve next years model."

Self Invasion : " As we transfer our whole being to the data bank, privacy will become a ghost or echo of its former self and what remains of community will disappear."

NEVERMIND ( ' the content ' )

Emily Litella : " What's all this talk about violins in the media ??? "

SYMBALLEIN

THROWING A SNOWBALL WITH A ROCK IN IT – Momentum Mori for Marshall McLuhan - By Gerald O’Grady

Help Beautify Junkyards !

" Nor so, nor so, good brother bottle-ale, for there are other places besides where money can bestow it selfe: the signe of the smock will wipe your mouth cleane; and yet I haue heard yee haue made her a tenant to your tap-houses. But what shall hee doo that hath spent himselfe? where shall hee haunt? Faith, when Dice, Lust, and Drunkennesse, and all haue dealt vpon him, if there be neuer a Playe for him to goe too for his pennie, he sits melancholie in his Chamber, deuising vpon felonie or treason, and howe he may best exalt himselfe by mischiefe."

Nanabush - The TRICKSTER

a "trickster" is that mythological figure who hovers on the borders of conscious and unconscious where light and shadows play tricks. In these twilight border zones there are no themes, no patterns, no shapes. Pursuit of the McLuhan trickster is even more difficult because he was a master of playing tricks with words. In fact, it was McLuhan himself who once said "I don't necessarily agree with everything I say."

Maclean's September 1967

To the McLuhanmobile Robin !!!

Trinity Hall Rowing Oar 1936

McLuhan's prized possession. [ click image for detail ]

TORONTO IS A HAPPENING ! ?

Toronto in the 50s personified McLuhan’s technophobia. It was a boring, forgotten city of three-quarters of a million people. Theall calls it an "overgrown village" adding it was a "somewhat idyllic…still semi-colonial, marginally contemporary city…a sedate, stuffy city where on Sundays the major department store drew curtains across its windows, stores did not sell cigarettes, and people could not have wine or other alcoholic beverages with a restaurant meal…There was no television; the only radio network, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)…was government owned."

The Tool Kit

Literally, Understanding Media is a kit of tools for analysis and perception. It is to begin an operation of discovery. It is not the completed work of discovery. It is intended for practical use. Most of my work in the media is like that of a safecracker. In the beginning I don’t know what’s inside. I just set myself down in front of the problem and begin to work. I grope, I probe, I listen, I test — until the tumblers fall and I’m in. That’s the way I work with all these media.

I’m perfectly prepared to scrap any statement I ever made about any subject once I find that it isn’t getting me into the problem. I have no devotion to any of my probes as if they were sacred opinions. I have no proprietary interest in my ideas and no pride of authorship as such. You have to push any idea to an extreme, you have to probe. Exaggeration, in the sense of hyperbole, is a major artistic device in all modes of art. No painter, no musician ever did anything without extreme exaggeration of a form or a mode, until he had exaggerated those qualities that interested him. - McLuhan Hot + Cool, Stearn, 1967: 58, 62-63

' The Tool Kit ' in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man consists of the seven chapters in Part One. They detail seven general principles of media in shaping culture and society. Understanding Media was conceived and written as a companion to a volume that had appeared a short while earlier, Understanding Poetry (1960) by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. It was the first American text to employ techniques of Practical Criticism. From the first, McLuhan continued to insist that Understanding Media was not a finished product but a group of beginnings, a tool kit and some preliminary forays into new territory.

ITOOWKWTHIGO

Barry Day - I'm The Only One Who Knows What The Hell Is Going On - The message of Marshall McLuhan, Lintas London (1967)

THE NEW AMERICAN VORTEX : "The Case of the Missing Anecdote"

This unpublished work is a collection of published and unpublished essays assembled by McLuhan ca. 1949. It appears that "The New American Vortex" was the intended title for the book, in addition to being the title of the lead essay. This sub-series consists of manuscripts and typescripts of the articles to be included in the work and a proposed table of contents.

UNPUBLISHED manuscript 'Prelude to Prufrock' - National Archives of Canada

This unpublished work is an anthology of early McLuhan essays on English literature, and seems to have been written in the 1940s. The sub-series consists of manuscripts and typescripts of short essays on Scott, Austen, Crabbe, Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Browning, Byron, Keats, and Shelley, and is divided in two parts, each part consisting of separate drafts of the essays.

RAZUMIJEVANIJE MEDIJA

" If I stopped to explain everything I said I’d never get anywhere, besides there has to be something for ' The Reader ' to do.”

TRIBAL MOOD MUD : " Self-amputation forbids self-recognition "

Thunder 10: Television. Back to tribal involvement in tribal mood-mud. The last thunder is a turbulent, muddy wake, and murk of non-visual, tactile man.

GRUNGE

"I find pop culture monstrous and sickening ... I study it for my own survival."

“the study of effects rather than the assertion of values.”

"He preferred 'put-ons' to 'put-downs'. "

" Society always prefers somnambulism to awareness.”

In Dagwood Bumstead, McLuhan saw the archetypal American man as a hen-pecked husband and failed father : “He is an apologetic intruder into a hygienic, and save for himself, a well-ordered dormitory. He attempts to eke out some sort of existence in the bathroom or on the sofa (face to the wall) ... He is a joke which the children thoroughly understand. ”

'working title' for The mechanical bride

' The Guide to Chaos ' ( the other working title) was ditched for being 'too anarchistic' ... American Everyman : Dagwood Bumstead = emasculated drone

rip-off technique

" If you study symbolism you will discover that it is a technique of rip-off by which figures are deliberately deprived of their ground."

Don Theall : "...Such a poetic technique permits McLuhan to merge figure and ground to study their interplay in communication and to involve his audience in participating actively in the process of understanding."

SCENES FROM A DOWNWARDS PARABOLA INTO SLEEP

Film by Etrog, Text by McLuhan

FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS

" To reward and make celebrities of artists can be a way of ignoring their prophetic work, and preventing its timely use for survival." - M.M.

post-humanism

" When this circuit learns your job, what are you going to do? "

Contraexplosion

"Joyce had essentially discovered the tetrad once he had seen through the television form. He even organized the large-scale structure of the WAKE on the tetrad: Book One deals with the amplification of technology. Book Two is concerned with the obsolescence of technologies. Book Three deals with the retrieval of forms, and Book Four is modeled on its "flipping-into-its-opposite" feature of technologies."

McLuhan Letter to Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, May 11, 1964

"... Joyce is quite explicit that (page 501) as the alphabet ends its cycle we move out of visual space into discontinuous auditory space again. This he mentions as the return to "Lewd's Carol", that is, through the looking glass into the world of non-Euclidean space once more, lewd, ignorant, tribal, involved totally as in group singing... " [ click image above to see/read the whole letter ]

magical priesthood : ELIOT, JOYCE, LEWIS + POUND

" Talk about blind spots in regions of maximal impact! Looking at The Diabolical Principle just now I read loud and clear that art must be totally environmental. It must be the content of nothing whatever. Ergo, the VORTEX = the totally environmental .… Lewis wants nothing less for Art than the power to create total environments for Life and Death. There must be no art as content of some other set of skills or interest.…I find it a bit staggering to confront Lewis as a man who really wanted to be Pontifex maximus of a magical priesthood. I suppose Yeats, Joyce and Pound had similar aspirations. Their priesthood was to create new worlds of perception. They were to be world engineers who shaped the totality of human awareness. Their pigments and materials were not to be paint or words but all the resources of the age. Such were the Pharaohs. They made of the world a perception Lab .… The mode of great Art. The environment as ultimate artefact." McLuhan to Wilfred Watson, 4 October 1964

high definition pro + con paperback

With a bonus McLuhan rebuttal

ergonomically challenged

McLuhan designed 'The Tripod Chair' in July 1965 and a prototype was manufactured in August 1966 for display at the Canadian Pavillion at Expo '67

McLuhan's CORPORATE SYMBOLIST POEM

“If you take away the dateline from any newspaper whatever, you have a quite handsome surrealist poem. … The dateline presents a plausible pretext of rationality, meaning, connection.”

" Doctor, your diagnosis is different from all the other doctors "

"Well, the autopsy will show that I was right."

“ There’s Money In Comics ”

Stan Lee : " DON’T WRITE DOWN TO YOUR READERS! It is common knowledge that a large portion of comic magazine readers are adults, and the rest of the readers who may be kids are pretty sharp characters. They are used to seeing movies and listening to radio shows… a great deal of thought goes into every story; and there are plenty of gimmicks, sub-plots, human interest angles…. "

McLuhan : " This happens to be true. In the matter of intellectual quality there is little to choose between Dare Devil Comics and Gone With the Wind and between the claims made for the romantic movie of our day, just as in the emotional pattern there is little or no difference between the ‘middle-brow’ and the ‘low-brow.’ The difference is mainly in the amount of lush verbiage and opulence of turnout. There is no question of perception or taste in the genteel movie or novel or in the pulps. But the superiority of the pulps is in their absence of pretentiousness, and the readers of this form of entertainment are altogether undeceived by it. They are never under the impression of having bought or read anything with ‘class.’ "

De mens in het elektronisch tijdperk

S T R O O O O O M V E R S N E L L I N G !!!

unpublished

MEME HOUSE

Eric McLuhan is more specific about the role Menippean satire plays in creating awareness among an otherwise oblivious public.

As an active form, a Menippean satire goes to any extreme necessary in order to frustrate objectivity or detachment on the part of the reader. … Cynics, and Diogenes in particular … were often referred to as ‘laughing philosophers,’ for they refused to take seriously any political, private, social, intellectual, or other kind of pretentiousness. (McLuhan, 1997, p. 5)

Instead they create what Eric McLuhan calls the “cynic effect” – a satirical response that creates new awareness by awakening the dulled perception of the reader. Thus, Menippean satire is not merely humour or irony, but humour or irony with a specific intentionality.

Joyce Portrait

by Wyndham Lewis

VORTOGRAPHS - Alvin Langdon Coburn

In 1916, Coburn met Ezra Pound, who introduced him to the short-lived Vorticism movement in Britain. These new visual aesthetics intrigued Coburn and, provoked by his growing spiritual quest, he began to re-examine his photographic style. He responded by making a bold and distinctive portrait of Pound, showing three over-lapping images of differing sizes. Within a brief period he moved from this semi-representative image to a series of abstract images that are among the first completely non-representative photographs ever made.

To make these images Coburn invented a kaleidoscope-like instrument with three mirrors clamped together, which when fitted over the lens of the camera would reflect and fracture the image. Pound called this instrument a "Vortescope" and the resulting photographs "Vortographs". He made only about 18 different Vortographs, taken over a period of just one month, yet they remain among the most striking images in early 20th century photography.

blast/counterblast

" Self-amputation forbids self-recognition "

Throwing realism out with the bathwater ...

" Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth." — Archimedes

" Today, Archimedes would have pointed to our electric media and said, " I will stand on your eyes, your ears, your nerves, and your brain, and the world will move in any tempo or pattern I choose." We have leased these "places to stand" to private corporations."

turntablism

" In his own case, Edison's determination to give the phonograph, like the telephone, a direct practical use in business procedures led to his neglect of the instrument as a means of entertainment. Failure to foresee the phonograph as a means of entertainment was really a failure to grasp the meaning of the electric revolution in general. In our time we are reconciled to the phonograph as a toy and a solace; but press, radio, and TV have also acquired the same dimension of entertainment. Meantime, entertainment pushed to an extreme becomes the main form of business and politics. Electric media, because of their total "field" character, tend to eliminate the fragmented specialities of form and function that we have long accepted as the heritage of alphabet, printing, and mechanization. The brief and compressed history of the phonograph includes all phases of the written, the printed, and the mechanized word. It was the advent of the electric tape recorder that only a few years ago released the phonograph from its temporary involvement in mechanical culture. Tape and the l.p. record suddenly made the phonograph a means of access to all the music and speech of the world. Before turning to the l.p. and tape-recording revolution, we should note that the earlier period of mechanical recording and sound reproduction had one large factor in common with the silent picture. The early phonograph produced a brisk and raucous experience not unlike that of a Mack Sennett movie."

Clip On Narcissus : The Agenbite of Outwit

" The point of the Narcissus myth is not that people are prone to fall in love with their own images but that people fall in love with extensions of themselves which they are convinced are not extensions of themselves. This provides, I think, a fairly good image of all of our technologies, and it directs us towards a basic issue, the idolatry of technology as involving a psychic numbness."

KROKER REMIX

"A superstar today is just another word for a sitting duck." - Marshall McLuhan

THIS IS NOT A PIPE : “... it was hand-rolled along the thigh of a Tahitian maiden ..."

" Outtragedy of poetscalds!, Acomedy of letters " [ FW 425.24]

aspen 4

"It is really more fun to join in the quest for discoveries than to try and classify and evaluate the processes in which I am involved."

MAGISCHEN of wychwood park

'Tis optophone which ontophanes. List! Wheatstone's magischen lyer. They will be tuggling foriver. They will be lichening for allof. They will be pretumbling forover. The harpsdischord shall be theirs for ollaves."

THE DOWNLOAD DOWNLOW

" hierarchitectitiptitoploftical, with a burning bush abob off its baubletop and with larrons o'toolers clittering up and tombles a'buckets clottering download. "

A book with no table of contents, no index, no organization, no discussion, no argument...

" ...Without the countervailing balance of natural and physical laws, the new video-related media will make man implode upon himself. As he sits in the informational control room, whether at home or at work, receiving data at enormous speeds — imagistic, sound, or tactile — from all areas of the world, the results could be dangerously inflating and schizophrenic."

Achtung Baby !

CHERRY + GREY

Voted most likely to start a Centre for Culture and Technolgy

I'M FEELING LUCKY !

" One chap googling the holyboy's thingabib and this lad wetting his widdle. "

L'ETRANGER

"The road to understanding media effects begins with arrogant superiority. If one lacked this sense of superiority, this detachment, it would be quite impossible to write about them. It would be like an octopus attacking the great pyramids."

post information studies

"Deception is the new discourse. Electric light only offers a convincing illusion of daylight, its 'content' being all the activities that are now permitted to take place after dark. As such it represents a complex simulation of experience that passes virtually unnoticed at a time when digital technology is in the process of rendering itself invisible. Hardware and software are converging to the point of total dematerialization. The old configurations of data streaming will eventually vanish into one another, leaving the replication of sound and vision as the sole industry standard for communication. Information ceases to be an intelligible part of the environment, but functions as an element instead: boundless, formless, creating vast artificial ecosystems out of networked systems." from "The Future is Back" by Ken Hollings 19 Feb 2010

FOLLOW THE HIDDEN GROUND

'The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it has no 'content'. And this makes it an invaluable instance of how people fail to study media at all.'

maelstrom brothers

A CONSCIOUS STRATEGY OF GROUCHO DALI-ISM : " Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted."

" I satirize at all times, and my hyperboles are as nothing compared to the events to which they refer."

patron saint

Detachment and ambivalence encourages simultaneous contradictory or paradoxical approaches to the same material.

WHAT IF HE'S RIGHT ? !

He sits in a little office off on the edge of the University of Toronto that looks like the receiving bin of a second-hand book store ... he doesn't seem to care what he wears. If he feels like it, he just puts on the old striped tie with the plastic neck band. You just snap the plastic band around your neck and there the tie is, hanging down and ready to go, Pree-Tide.

project 69 : "NEW MEDIA ARE NOT BRIDGES BETWEEN MAN AND NATURE; THEY ARE NATURE."

Report on Project in Understanding New Media prepared for and published by The National Association of Educational Broadcasters for the Department of Education, Washington, D.C., 1960

CLASSROOM WITHOUT WALLS

Designed as a Grade 11 media literacy textbook, it was published in 1977 in the United States and was quickly ignored by everyone.

subliminal

I have insisted that any new structure for codifying experience and moving information, be it alphabet or photography, has the power of imposing its structural character and assumptions upon all levels of our private and social lives – even without the benefit of concepts or of conscious acceptance…. That is what I’ve always meant by “the medium is the message”. Interview with Thomas P. McDonnell, U.S. Catholic, 1966

All situations are composed of an area of attention [figure] and a very much larger (subliminal) area of inattention [ground] ….Figures rise out of, and recede back into, ground….for example, at a lecture, the attention will shift from the speaker’s words to his gestures, to the hum of the lighting or street sounds, or to the feel of the chair or a memory or association or smell, each new figure alternatively displaces the others into ground…The ground of any technology is both the situation that gives rise to it as well as the whole environment (medium) of services and disservices that the technology brings with it. These are side effects and impose themselves willy-nilly as a new form of culture.

dissociated sensibility : "Never did a person give so many clues as to how to understand his work."

Holmes genius for constructing patterns from chaotic surface events is a critical perceptual tactic for the electronic/information age ...

futile holeopathic 'tiny note' protest

" Television kills telephony in brothers' broil. Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen! And wolfbone balefires blaze the trailmost if only that Mary Nothing may burst her bibby ..."

COUNTER INTELLIGENCE

1970 Covert Smear Campaign [ click image to enlarge ]

MEDIA ECOLOGY 'CUL DE SAC'

[1:1 13.5] " ... silence speaks the scene. Fake! So This Is Dyoublong? Hush! Caution ! Echoland ! How charmingly exquisite! It reminds you of the outwashed engravure that we used to be blurring on the blotchwall ..."

Network 1951 - unpublished

"a dove launched from an ark to discover not whether there is land, but whether there are men."

more metonymy

" Classification makes some people feel more secure. It seems to relieve them of any need for further study."

McLuhan did not trust the academic's love of classification and simplification, as this could distort the truth out of a desire for clarity.

POST-TACTILE

'Those who do not learn from the future are condemned to repeat it' - Destroy All Monsters

heavy metal thunder

McLuhan recognized in Joyce 'the prescient explorer', one who used patterns of linguistic energy to discern the patterns of culture, society and technology.

"The sounds we utter are structured in acoustic space by noise spaced in silence."

Explorations explored the grammars of such languages as print, the newspaper format and television. It argued that revolutions in the packaging and distribution of ideas and feelings modified not only human relations but also sensibilities. It further argued that we are largely ignorant of literacy's role in shaping Western man [and woman], and equally unaware of the role of electronic media in shaping modern values. Literacy's vested interests were so deep that literacy itself was never examined. And the current electronic revolution is already so pervasive that we have difficulty in stepping outside of it and scrutinizing it objectively. But it can be done, and a fruitful approach is to examine one medium through another..."

STEPHEN 'GUITAR' HERO

" The Wake is not, like a novel, to be read all at one go, but to be sampled and sipped and relished in bits. And used. "

RAINDANCE

RADICAL SOFTWARE = BERYL KOROT

SONY PORT-A-PAK = PORTABLE VIDEO
1967 : the first portable video recording device was the Sony CV-2400 Video Rover.
" The Portapak would seem to have been invented specifically for use by artists. Just when pure formalism had run its course; just when it became politically embarrassing to make objects, but ludicrous to make nothing; just when many artists were doing performance works but had nowhere to perform, or felt the need to keep a record of their performances; just when it began to seem silly to ask the same old Berkleean question, 'If you build a sculpture in the desert where no one can see it, does it exist?'; just when it became clear that TV communicates more information to more people than large walls do; just when we understood that in order to define space it is necessary to encompass time; just when many established ideas in other disciplines were being questioned and new models were proposed - just then the Portapak became available."

NO OBJECTION

" The modern Red Ridinghood, reared on iPod commercials, has no objections to being eaten by the wolf. "

this is not a bagpipe

"All electric forms whatsoever have a decentralizing effect, cutting across the older mechanical patterns like a bagpipe in a symphony." Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964, p.167

"I'm not really here, I just stick around for my friends."

"Consequently, the steady announcement of new telematic 'discoveries' - such as, molecular computer chips, cell-sized nano bio-engines for 'invisible travel' through the blood stream, new genetic hybrids from the labs of all the recombinant geneticists - attracts not a ripple of discontent nor a muted cry of ideological discord because these manifestations of 'technology outreach' into the body electronic are less a brave new horizon of telematic wilderness clear-cutting, than an already nostalgic sign of our (wired) past." Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein, Data Trash, 1994, p.74

"A hand from the cloud emerges, holding a chart expanded."

"I thought we achieved anarchy very completely long ago ... I didn't realize it was something that remained to be done. And I think we're going further in every minute."

We're back in Acoustic Space: " electricity is not a thing that "flows" but is "the condition we observe when there are certain spatial relationships between things."

Aren't they going to turn that down ?

" The Go-go Dancer ... Virgin in deep frieze. The inner trip doesn’t need any connections with the outer world. The dancers become icons, things. There is no storyline. They live out of time in an eternal present. Growing up absurd in the Theatre of the Absurd ...Sound, in the new world, of song and dance, is not for listening ...its for 'making' ..."

"gorilla" theater

The Yippies' most famous actions was "an attack" on the New York Stock Exchange where they threw money to the floor which precipitated a huge brawl for the scattered dollar bills ... as well as their involvement at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, at which they nominated a pig for president.

Clip On Wolfe : a "take-off" or a "put-on" ?

" The topless waitress is the opening wedge of the trial balloon "

"In the future, everyone will have privacy for 15 minutes." - Bob Dobbs

cf. "McLuhan and Recent Art History" by Frank Gillette 1998

Revolution for the hell of it !

In part, the Yippies borrowed this epistemological model from the aphoristic thinking of mass media guru Marshall McLuhan ... The Yippies knew and believed what McLuhan said about modern politics and television : "The party system has folded like the organizational chart. Politics and issues are uesless for election purposes since they are too specialized and hot. The shaping of a candidate's integral image has taken the place of discussing conflicting points of view."

Rudy de Harak

How many 'communication theorists' does it take to screw in a light bulb ? An infinite number and the process goes on forever.

" Writing about music is like dancing about architecture ! "

" WORDS WON'T STAY PUT "

I.A. RICHARDS : " PROTO-FLARF-IST ? "

PROVOCATIVE IDIOCY

1970s backlash : Hans Magnus Enzensberger dismissed McLuhan as a 'charlatan' who wrote nothing more than 'provocative idiocy' . Having absolutely no conception of the tradition Menippean Satire, Hans later died when an emergency 'sense of humour' transplant failed.

" ... WE DON'T GET EXCITED AT WHAT WE HAVE INVENTED, WE HUNT MACHINES ..."

" Laughter is the sudden handshake of mystic violence and the anarchist." Wyndham Lewis

Kelvin Rowing Club 1927

" We don't know who discovered water, but it certainly wasn't a rower. "

1928 Kelvin Yearbook

" We grew up with him telling us he was a Prairie boy and a Winni-pigeon " said his daughter Elizabeth ... "He always said Winnipeg is where he was from."

NO DOME FOR HOME

Gerald O'Grady : " The American Pavilion was a celebration of Pop Art housed in a resplendent geodesic dome designed by R. Buckminister Fuller, a structure which McLuhan tried to purchase to house his Centre for Culture and Technology in Toronto. "

Unfortunately, funding was nowhere to be found. McLuhan was undaunted: "We shall concentrate upon achieving an intellectual identity rather than a physical one," he maintained. Thus, the Centre's physical incarnation remained McLuhan's small office in the English Department at St. Michael's College until Professor Arthur Porter, the acting director of the Centre while McLuhan was at Fordham U. in 1967 - 68, obtained the Coach House for McLuhan's Centre.

CYBERNETIC SERENDIPIDITY ?

"A McLuhan Megillah" : Fluxus Happening 1966

" I KNOW IT LIKE THE PALM OF MY HAND "

"All takes are mistakes" - Stan Brahkage

UNPUBLISHED 1952

"If we grant that human existence is the state of damnation, two possibilities follow. Either we can learn to retrace the stages of our fall into matter, and so escape, or we can devise some means of extinction of personality. The pagan art and culture of the world, past and present, is divided in the pursuit of these alternatives. On one hand art is followed as a continuous labyrinth in which by blind, dogged persistence we may struggle upward by means of will power and ethical struggle. On the other hand there is the intellectual course presented by Mr. Eliot, in which we move from one intensity to another, towards a final flash of awareness and extinction. In the one art - that linked with Plato's cave man - Time, continuity, dialectic, are of the essence. In the other, time is lost in simultaneities and juxtapositions."

Master of Implosion

" Less an idiot than intellectual jester in the humanist tradition of Erasmus's folly, Joyce's wit, and Rabelais's bawdiness, McLuhan played the clown in order to infiltrate specialist discourses and cross the wires of disciplines and satirise them in a mode he called 'anti-environmental'. While McLuhan may have lacked the sense of folly as a philosophical vocation, by playing the clown he was also playing at being an artist. He chose eclecticism over the effort to synthesize. He used probes, puns, blasts and counterblasts, and the mosaic method instead of interrative strategies. He was a media artist who created the new form that Donald Theall (1971) dubbed "the concrete essay" with its collide-oscopic principles of typographic play, surrealistic juxtaposition of images, and unfortunately, heavy doses of technological mystification."

UNPUBLISHED

" Today, the business of business is becoming the constant invention of new business "

UNPUBLISHED

"XEROX makes everybody a publisher" : a study of the impact of xerography on literacy and publishing

THE FUTURE AIN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE ! ( and neither is the past or the present )

" The 20th century is the century in which 'change' changed. "

SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY

empson paraphrase : " The only form of response that people in general ever make to anything is a numb, somnambulist response. They do whatever happens to come into their heads - like tulips."

RETRIEVAL, RESUSCITATION OR REANIMATION ?

WORKING TITLE

"The Mechanical Bride is really a new form of science fiction, with ads and comics cast as characters. Since my object is to show the community in action rather than *prove* anything, it can indeed be regarded as a new kind of novel." - LETTERS, p.217.

COINTEL PRO

Black Op : Rhetorical skillz to pay the billz

DEAD LIST

January 9th, 2002 to July 3rd, 2008

just say "no way" to the spadina expressway

12 minute film collaboration with director David MacKay 1970

early fusillade

"My approach to any question? To refuse to have a fixed viewpoint."

RIGHT WINGER FOR THE ' WINNIPEG SCHOOL '

Shooting from the lip : " There's a face off in the corner ! " ... " OMG ! Whose is it ? "

ZKM + McLuhan 100 : July 1 to October 31, 2011

Curator/Producer : Peter Weibel Exhibition/Catalogue : Gerald O'Grady

On Aphorism

" Aphorisms representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire farther; whereas Methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if they were at farthest."

using your noodle !

Orion of the Orgiasts, Meereschal MacMuhun, the Ipse dadden, product of the extremes giving quotidients to our means...

McLuhan = " Applied Joyce "

" Listening to the simultaneous messages of Dublin, James Joyce released the greatest flood of oral linguistic music that was ever manipulated into art. «The prouts who will invent a writirig there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally. That's the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have occasioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects. Joyce is, in the «Wake,» making his own Altamira cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind, in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all the phases of human culture and technology. As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let's make it a wake or awake or both, Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious."

Joyce = " Applied Aquinas "

Standard Aristotelian/Thomistic doctrine: the USER of any medium is the CONTENT; in the same way human consciousness is an analogical mirror.

Prairie Post Modern | PARA MODERN ?

" Understanding always requires a multidimensional approach and should always include humour."

KELVIN : Cherry + Grey

Home of the Clippers

CODEBOOK

" Media are make-happen rather than make-aware agents."

$1,600 Grant

$1,600 Grant from IODE enabled Marshall to study at Cambridge.

global village idiot

The Situationist Guy Debord wrote of McLuhan that he was "the spectacle's first apologist, who had seemed to be the most convinced imbecile of the century."

PAGE 119

" The electronic age ... angelizes man, disembodies him. Turns him into software."

FUTURE MEMORY : The Keys to. Given !

" It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."

The Place Marie Dialogues

Andrew Chrystall + Bob discuss " McLuhan and multi-consciousness "

TRIBAL DRUM

The man of the tribal world led a complex, kaleidoscopic life precisely because the ear, unlike the eye, cannot be focused and is synaesthetic rather than analytical and linear. Speech is an utterance, or more precisely, an outering, of all our senses at once; the auditory field is simultaneous, the visual successive. The models of life of nonliterate people were implicit, simultaneous and discontinuous, and also far richer than those of literate man. By their dependence on the spoken word for information, people were drawn together into a tribal mesh; and since the spoken word is more emotionally laden than the written--conveying by intonation such rich emotions as anger, joy, sorrow, fear--tribal man was more spontaneous and passionately volatile. Audile-tactile tribal man partook of the collective unconscious, lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual, its values divine and unchallenged, whereas literate or visual man creates an environment that is strongly fragmented, individualistic, explicit, logical, specialized and detached.

leg pull

" We have now become aware of the possibility of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art."

QUENTIN'S 'conscious mediumship'

" consciousness can be affected by the knowing collision of verbal and visual information. "

GLADSTONE ELEMENTARY

"we can only catch glimpses of the future through the rear-view mirror as we reverse boldly into tomorrow..."

Page 69

"Cubism ('multi-locationalism') is one of the painterly forms of acoustic space."

sputnik, proscenium arch, global theatre

"Much of what I had to say makes a good deal more sense now than it did in 1964."

Ted + Marshall at Carpenter’s farm by the sea on Long Island.

In 1980, McLuhan spent his last summer at Carpenter’s farm by the sea on Long Island. "He walked, waded, rode horseback. But he could not speak. Only during Mass did words and songs and gestures return, however feebly."

Lectures + Interviews

"We learn from history that we do not learn anything from history."

Exaggeration, in the sense of hyperbole, is a major artistic device in all modes of art.

I’m perfectly prepared to scrap any statement I ever made about any subject once I find that it isn’t getting me into the problem. I have no devotion to any of my probes as if they were sacred opinions. I have no proprietary interest in my ideas and no pride of authorship as such. You have to push any idea to an extreme, you have to probe. Exaggeration, in the sense of hyperbole, is a major artistic device in all modes of art. No painter, no musician ever did anything without extreme exaggeration of a form or a mode, until he had exaggerated those qualities that interested him. (Stearn, 1967: 58, 62-63)

York Wilson McLuhan Portraits

Your ' soaking ' in it !

" Begin with theory, you begin with the answer; begin with observation, you begin with questions."

Bucky + Marshall

" There are no remote places anymore. Under instant circuitry, nothing is remote in time or in space. It's now."

Belloc : Chesterton's Hidden Ground

Click image to read The Mercy of Allah

WE ARE LIGHT

" Ahorror, he sayd, canting around to that beddest his friend, the tayler, for finixed coulpure, chunk pulley muchy chink topside numpa one sellafella, fake an capstan make and shoot !"

THE PILGRIM

" The Wake is a strange book - a compound of fable, symphony, nightmare; a monstrous enigma beckon­ing imperiously from the shadowy pits of sleep."

APT SYMBOL

EDUTAINMENT

Frank Film

Don't protest the media ... become the media !

" Far more thought and care go into the composition of a prominent ad in a newspaper than go into the writing of their features and editorials."

Tony Schwartz plunderphonics

TARGET PRACTICE

" So long as I am violently disapproved of, "I am on the right course." "

NUDE DESCENDING CLIP ON NECK-TIE

" The transforming power of media is easy to explain, but the ignoring of this power is not at all easy to explain."

THE RIDDLER

“He was basically a poet,” says Ted Carpenter, the renowned anthropologist and collaborator with McLuhan on the journal Explorations. “He was a jester, a shaman.” All wonderful personas, but none of them much welcome in the academy then -- or now. The more popular he became, the more his colleagues questioned his insights. In retrospect, the backlash seems inevitable."

SEPARATED AT BIRTH ?

Os Meios De Comunicacao

el buen gusto es el primer refugio de los imbeciles

earmapping

" You don't really understand something until you understand it more than one way."

Reductionist

O Meio Sao As Massagens

Um Inventario de Efeitos

Sloganeering 101 : BullsEYE !

" It's one of the greatest slogans of all advertising of all time ! " said Neve Savage, vice president of marketing and communications for AT&T Wireless.

"Reach Out and Touch Someone"

N.W. Ayer, one of America's oldest advertising agencies, needed a creative approach to help AT&T soften its image in the face of growing concerns about AT&T's potential monopoly. So Ken D'Ambrosio helped develop the concept for a print and TV campaign that incorporated the now famous "Reach Out and Touch Someone" tag line. We can credit Marshall McLuhan for creating the tagline "Reach out and touch someone" for Ma Bell. This campaign was designed to soften AT&T's image and position the company as an indispensable element of everyday American life.

The GAP is where the action is !

Gerk gawk in the GAP

'MOSAIC' OR 'FIELD' APPROACH

'' WINNIPEG BEACH '' BUMS

" We Shall Not Cease from Exploration ! "

The New American Vortex by Andrew Chrystall (2008) : As McLuhan notes in the "Typhon in America" the great mistake, of course, is to suppose that what went on physically in Birkenau does not go on psychologically in America and England. "Intellectually, spiritually and emotionally this is precisely what we have been doing for some decades." "There is no difference in result between our entertainment industry and Asian or Soviet brainwashing programs. Our revulsion at these is irrational as we have developed more complex and subtle ways of achieving the same end. Far from being a conscious conspiracy, this is a nightmare dream from which we would do well to awaken at once..."

UNBOUND

WEBCOR : LIVING A LIFE OF TAPE

Tony Schwartz : Media Pioneer and Audio Documentarian - First person to own a Webcor tape recorder in North America.

When Marshall McLuhan met Tony Schwartz, he said he met "a disciple with twenty years prior experience!" Later, McLuhan and Schwartz shared the Schweitzer Chair at Fordham University.

hot, cool + brainless involvement

Sense + NonSense

Sloganeering 101 : " Tim , you have to come up with something 'snappy' ! "

" Lysurgic Acid hits the spot ... 40 billion neurons that’s a lot ! "

MANITOBA ROOTS : POETRY, PARODY AND COMEDY AS A SOCIAL WEAPON

Manitoba Master's Thesis : George Meredith as a Poet and Dramatic Novelist [Click image to read thesis in .pdf format] Nota Bene : McLuhan's early interest in comedy, parody and satire as artistic and intellectual devices.

A Perfect Reader

" McLuhan neither seeks nor deserves merely an interested reader. Rather he, as with others in the “tradition” he participates, seeks a perfect reader with a perfect case of insomnia." Andrew Chrystall, The New American Vortex

"sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noodle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia" (FW 120.12-14.)

flicker

31 fps

FACEPLANT

McLuhan's Fair 1967

HASH GIRL

Counter Cultural + Anti-Environmental : " I'm the only one who knows what the hell is going on."

typewriter man

THE WALLS HAVE EARS

Sonic Youth : Feedback R US !

o espaco na poesia e na pintura

GUERRA E PAZ

«McLuhan Caged (in Electronic Art II)»

Fluxus is similar in spirit to the earlier art movement of Dada, emphasizing the concept of anti-art and taking jabs at the seriousness of modern art. Fluxus artists used their minimal performances to highlight their perceived connections between everyday objects and art, similarly to Duchamp in pieces such as Fountain. Fluxus art was often presented in "events", which Fluxus member George Brecht defined as "the smallest unit of a situation". The events consisted of a minimal instruction, opening the events to accidents and other unintended effects. Also contributing to the randomness of events was the integration of audience members into the performances, realizing Duchamp's notion of the viewer completing the art work. The Fluxus artistic philosophy can be expressed as a synthesis of four key factors that define the majority of Fluxus work: 1. Fluxus is an attitude. It is not a movement or a style. 2. Fluxus is intermedia. Fluxus creators like to see what happens when different media intersect. They use found and everyday objects, sounds, images, and texts to create new combinations of objects, sounds, images, and texts. 3. Fluxus works are simple. The art is small, the texts are short, and the performances are brief. 4. Fluxus is fun. Humour has always been an important element in Fluxus.

VERBI - VOCO - VISUAL : Something Else Press 1967

" Most people, are alive in an earlier time, but you must be alive in our own time. The artist, is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness."

MILLER : Agent of Moscow

HIT JOB ON A WACK JOB ?

both informative and contradictory !

ALLAN KAPROW : "The point is to make something new, something that doesnt even remotely remind you of culture."

“The Company of Us"

From Beat Scene Poet to Psychedelic Multimedia Artist in San Francisco and Beyond, 1948-1978 Gerd Stern

dissolving phantasmagoria

INTERMEDIA

Media Study, Media Practice, Media Pioneers 1973 -1990

EDIBLE SPACESHIPS

LIVE ! from wychwood park !

SIMULATION OF SIMULATION

" IN THE EMPTY SPACE OF DESIRE,
THE SEATS DON'T COME CHEAP. "
- Jean Beaudrillard,
The Conspiracy Of Art

" BED IN " AS HAPPENING

McLuhan: Language is a form of organized stutter. Literally, you chop your sounds up into bits in order to talk. Now, when you sing, you don't stutter, so singing is a way of stretching language into long, harmonious patterns and cycles. How do you think about language in songs? John: Language and song is to me, apart from being pure vibrations, just like trying to describe a dream. And because we don't have telepathy or whatever it is, we try and describe the dream to each other, to verify to each other what we know, what we believe is inside each other. And the stuttering is right - because we can't say it. No matter how you say it, it's never how you want to say it.

WHAT DID THE BOYSCOUT SAY TO THE NUN AFTER SHE THANKED HIM FOR HELPING HER ACROSS THE STREET ?

" That's all right Madame ... any friend of Batman is a friend of mine ! "

UNDERSTANDING MEDIA

"In the age of the bikini and of skin-diving, we begin to understand 'the castle of our skin' as a space and world of its own." - Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

WE'RE BACK IN ACOUSTIC SPACE !

twenty twenty vision

TAKE TODAY

Punditry as Artform : "It was Stupid ... It was Atrocious ... when it broke down it was the thing rebelling against its misuse..."

McLuhan's 'HIDDEN GROUND'

"Lewis was an 'avant-garde' all by himself..."

quantum fluctuations

" A culture of quantum fluctuations where you can only know that you have never seen what you thought you were looking at because you have never really heard what you were listening to." Arthur Kroker, Spasm: Virtual Reality, Android Music and Electric Flesh, p.53, 1993.

KANÄLE

DIE BRAUT

DIE MAGISCHEN DIE !

"Radio: The Tribal Drum." 1964

HIGH DEFINITION

" The word makes the Market ..."

HUGO THE FREEMASON : " Norrie is not struggling for his place in the sun. He is the sun."

"Have with you to Madison Avenue; or, The Flush Profile of Literature"

MOON UNIT

McLuhan called himself "a Cancerian, a moonchild, very affected by the behaviour of the moon."

MOON CHILD

"I naturally feel flattered that Apollo 11 is scheduled to put a man on the moon on my birthday, July 21. Of course the reason for choosing July, the moon month, is derived from occult symbolism of Zodiac signs. The 12:12 a.m. touchdown will establish a new chemical bond of resonance with space-capsule moon. The reverberations will alter all earthly music and patterns for all time to come. The innovators and perpetrators, now as always, are innocent of any awareness of the consequences of their images." (Marshall McLuhan, "Kahn-Frontation," unpublished MS., 2-3)

DUB HOUSING

COMPRENDRE

testing ... 1, 2 , 3 ...

Jerome Agel, Quentin Fiore, Marshall McLuhan and John Simon

HOMO TYPOGRAPHICUS

WAR : what is it good for ?

WE LIVE 200 YEARS EVERY ANNUM

DOT ZERO MAGAZINE

" Decline of the Visual " May 1964

D'OEIL A OREILLE

TWO CENTS

" Unless a statement is startling, no one will pay any attention."

"MAC (SIC) LUHAN" MUTATIONS

Book of selected essays by Marshall McLuhan published by Maison Mame, France. The book includes “What TV Is Really Doing to Your Children”, “Great Changeovers for You”, “The Future of Education”, “The Future of Sex.” [Translation by Francois Chesneau, see section Other Works, year 1967 below]. Published by Editions HMH, Montréal, 1969 ~ Holland, 1970.

WET T-SHIRT

On Innovation, Non-Violence, Fascism and the Female Orgasm

French Massage : HAPPY ENDING

Explorations Four (4) Studies in Culture and Communications

“the study of effects rather than the assertion of values ... ” or as he put it, he preferred 'put-ons' to 'put-downs'.

WORDPRESS

" A bone, a pebble, a ramskin ... leave them to terracookin the muttheringpot; and Gutenmorg with his cromagnom charter, tintingfats and great prime must once for omniboss stepp rubrickredd out of the wordpress "

TACTILITY THAT GRABS YOU !

" the magazine article as performance" Roles, Masks and Performance, New Literary History 2.3, 1971

" The overwhelming fact about Time is its style. It has often been said that nobody could tell the truth in Time style. Time is a nursery book in which the reader is slapped and tickled alternately. It is full of predigested pap, spooned out with confidential nudges. The reader is never on his own for an instant, but, as though at his mother's knee, he is provided with the right emotions for everything he hears or sees as the pages turn. The complex issues of politics and international relations are reduced to a newsreel, with accompaniment by Spike Jones. Biographer Noel Busch has said that the march of events in Time, instead of resembling a ragged mob shuffling down the side street of perception, becomes a glittering parade with flags waving, bands playing, and the ranks keeping step. Time's readers are the enthusiastic kids lining the curbs as Time marches on. Totalitarianism engendered by the mass hypnosis of power, glitter, and the spectacle of regular ranks rather than insight or intelligibility is the object of all of Time's technical brilliance. Meanwhile, the editors of Time stand at mock attention in the reviewing stand, thumbing their noses at humanity."

CONSCIOUS MEDIUMSHIP

" Talent rides in a hackneyed vehicle."

MEDNA

Il medium è il massaggio ?

REALIDAD !

THE CITY AS CLASSROOM

YOU'VE GOT WOOD !

" You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. "

" - ESQUE "

Like Kafka ... McLuhan is a writer who is often referred to or quoted without being understood ...

" Television is reality, and reality is less than television. "

Brian O'Blivion: " After a while, I started hallucinating, and developed a tumor. I believe the visions caused the tumor, and not the other way around."

The Game Is Discovery

"It is really more fun to join in the quest for discoveries than to try and classify and evaluate the processes in which I am involved."

ALP

ANALOGICAL

"The analogical relation between exterior posture and gesture and the interior movements and dispositions of the mind is the irreducible basis of drama. In the Wake this appears everywhere. So that any attempt to reduce its action, at any point, to terms of univocal statement results in radical distortion.(p.33)... It needs to be understood that only short discontinuous shots of such a work as Joyce's are possible. Linear or continuous perspectives of analogical structures are only the result of radical distortion, and the craving for 'simple explanations' is the yearning for univocity."(p.36-7)

Marshall McLuhan, James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial (1953) in The Interior Landscape, pp.33 and 36-7, 1969

EFFECTS PRECEDING CAUSES

"For Joyce has solved numerous problems which Science has not yet formulated as problems."

His Primary Game

" What McLuhan contributed were not ideas, arguments, theories or critiques, but intuitions, perceptions, wandering explorations of unexplored terrain, satiric responses and poetic reactions...His primary game: teasing people into believing his percepts to be theoretical concepts..."

Donald Theall's The Virtual Marshall McLuhan is not a biography of McLuhan, nor is it an application or elaboration of his views. It is perhaps best understood as an exercise in retrieval, an attempt to rescue McLuhan from McLuhanism and McLuhanites, from those who would portray him as the patron saint of the new corporate technotopia as well as from those…who would read him as an early voice in the wilderness, warning of civilization’s demise.

Litter 2 Germ's Choice

scribble

"I am boring through a mountain from 2 sides. The question is, how to meet in the middle."- James Joyce

PREFACE TO 4TH DIMENSION

PERE UBU

Datapanic In The Year Zero

Die Magischen Kanale

"Understanding media is not a pleasant process or experience. It involves growing awareness of the numbness and stupefaction visited upon those invested with the social clothing of coinage, writing, rail, telephone, TV, markets and industrial technologies. What is necessary is "the artist energy to live in the present."

extensiones humano

EL MEDIO

CIRCUITO

NO HAY

MASAJE

HM vs HMM

ジェームスジョイス著FINNEGANSの航跡

LP ON CD

TETRADIC

"Examples of the operation of the four laws for various communication media follow: VERBUM (utterance): (A) Intensifies and crystallizes percept - as word (thing); (B) Obsolesces the merely sensory via perceptual interplay; (C) Retrieval: transference of power from things to word-as-vortex; (D) Reverses into the conceptual (replay of meaning-minus-the experience)."

FAUX NEWS

" The daily newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem ..."

The Non-Linear Museum

ON OFF ON OFF ON OFF

GANG SIGNS

Achtung Baby !

MELLOW YELLOW

グローバルビレッジ

媒体はマッサージである

TYPOGRAPHIQUE !

C'est Le Guerre

Маршалл Маклюэн

WEATHER MAN

Phatic Communion = Sunny Today !

ALTOGETHER FASCINATING !

" How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing ! "

Cambridge Man

1937 : A New Critic + A New Catholic

APT PUPIL

McLuhan : "Tony Schwartz is The Communications Guru of the Electronic Age"

LOLOMGWTF

The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the change from a culture in which all the senses partook of a common interplay to a tyranny of the visual. Movable type, with its ability to reproduce texts accurately and swiftly, extended the drive toward homogeneity and repeatability already in evidence in the emergence of perspectival art and the exigencies of the single "point of view".

McLuhan : "the world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age."

SO IT GOES ...

" Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers."

Never Translated

try again ...

Error Message: Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords

JOHN CAGE INTRO

GREATEST HITS : NO THEORY ALLOWED

" A theory always turns into a scientist’s point of view and a way of seeing the job at hand. Begin with observation and your task is to look at things and to look at what happens. To see. That necessitates detachment, and training of critical awareness ...I don’t have a Theory of Communication” means “I don’t work in the way of Normal Science. I don’t start with a theory to prove or disprove or submit to the torturers. I start with—and stick with—observation.”

WEB 3.0 = D.O.A.

LONG LIVE THE INTERNET !

RECONFIGURE YOUR DNA

Beyond Data Trash

LUCIFERIAN CONSPIRACY

" The new media are not toys ; they should not be in the hands of Mother Goose and Peter Pan executives ..."

Lucifer [from Latin] meaning "light-bearer"

"The modern media are engaged in a Luciferian conspiracy against the truth."

"RED"

CATCH 22 SQUARED

“It seems to be a human characteristic to hide the effects of our actions when they move into disservices.” “At the Flip Point of Time – The Point of More Return".

BISON DAYS ...

"I never took university days seriously in Manitoba. All I knew was that I was not getting an education."

SPACE THEORY

"It is postulated that just as white is a result of the assembling of the primary colors in ratio, so touch is an assembly of all the senses in ratio. Black is, therefore, the after-image of touch." - Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting, p.15, 1968.

tricksterism

The legendary trickster that Theall pursues in his quest is full of paradox, contradictions and ambiguities. Not because McLuhan tried to be ambiguous but rather because he believed that truth lingered somewhere within the enveloping haze of ambiguity. McLuhan’s method, Theall observes, was one of the "satiric poet" and that this allowed him to freely "construct his paradoxical probes, so that they may have multiple, often contradictory meanings." It was used more as a strategy of rhetoric rather than as a method of building a bullet-proof theory. The problem, though, is that over the years many have looked for rules and laws in McLuhan’s "paradoxical probes." As Theall notes, "The potential weakness appears when his rhetorico-poetic project becomes fact or formula rather than insight and intuition." ... "a great part of every human experience is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot."

INDIRECTLY

"You can never perceive the impact of any new technology directly, but it can be done in the manner of Perseus looking in the mirror at Medusa. It has to be done indirectly."Marshall McLuhan, Address at Vision '65, The American Scholar, p.202, Spring, 1966

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

"A bell is to auditory space what a polished surface is to a visual space - a mirror. ALP is river mirror of HCE the mountain. It is he for whom the belles toil."

a new humanist movement in Hell

"Wyndham Lewis is perhaps the first creative writer to have taken over the new media en bloc as modes of artistic and social control. (Joyce and Eliot have done so on a smaller scale.)(p.17)... With the help of modern scientific medicine he (Lewis-ed.) re-edits and refurnishes the various levels of Dante's Inferno in a startling way. The Devils appear as film stars perturbed by the ease with which their supernatural dimensions are mimicked by modern publicity devices. It's this power of the new media which fosters a new humanist movement in Hell." (p.18) Marshall McLuhan, Third Program in the Human Age, Explorations Magazine, Volume 8, p.17-8, October, 1957

Unfinished, Unpublished, Abandoned

"Keep In Touch" : McLuhan, Fiore, Agel book on 'Automation' was to feature upside down typography and graphics

Holding the eye closed ...

"The ability to close one eye at a time seems to be associated with literacy. Literacy involves a unique sensory pattern.It shatters the natural orchestration of the senses and permits far greater control over individual senses, especially when one sense is used in isolation."

The terror of self-awareness

"In the world of electronic technology we humbly encounter the primitive as avant-garde. This search for the primitive is surely one of the most remarkable features of our age. It’s as if we feared we had carried too far our experiment in rationalism, but wouldn’t admit it. And so we called forth other cultures in exotic and disguised forms to administer all of those experiences suppressed among us."

Ted Carpenter : On Anthropological Method

On Anthropological Method : “the approach I have recommended is generally called ‘mystical’ or ‘subjective’ or ‘insight without method....That competent fieldwork should be called ‘mystical’ and incompetent fieldwork called ‘scientific’ is one of the more remarkable features of our profession”

Opening words ...

"Electricity has made angels of us all. Not angels in the Sunday school sense of being good or having wings, but spirit, freed from flesh, capable of instant transportation anywhere. The moment we pick up a phone, we’re nowhere in space—everywhere in spirit. That is Saint Augustine’s definition of God: a being whose center is everywhere, whose borders are nowhere."

" WE'RE SOAKING IN IT ! "

" Media are really environments, with all the effects geographers & biologists associate with environments. We live inside our media. We are their content. TV images come to us so fast, in such profusion, they engulf us, tattoo us. We're immersed. It's like skin diving. We're surrounded & whatever surrounds, involves. TV doesn't wash over us and then go "out of mind." It goes into mind, deep into mind. The subconscious is a world in which we store everything, not something, and TV extends the subconscious....Such experiences are difficult to describe in words. Like dreams or sports, they evade verbal classification. "

HARK ! THE HERALD INNIS WRINGS

"My book, The Gutenberg Galaxy is a footnote to the observations of Harold Innis."

PARA McLUAHN

In honor of H. Marshall McLuhan, a forum for dialogue (informed by an abiding sense of “relevance”), and for a project the late Donald F. Theall described as walking both beside and beyond McLuhan (PARA-McLuhan). “We shall not cease from exploration!”

LEARNED CARNIVALESQUE SATIRE

"The 'put-on' is a situation I study a great deal."

DO THE D.E.W.

“Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”

EVOL : "These go to Eleven ! "

My Favorite Martian ...

Martian McLuhan

LAST WORDS ...

" Does nobody understand ? "

DE-PERPLEXING

McLuhanisme

"Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is 'past time are pastimes.' The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the 20th century, the number of 'past times' that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist's role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of 'doubleness' or 'interplay' because this type of hendiadys dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy." - Marshall McLuhan, From Cliché to Archetype

the story begins only when the book closes...

"It will be a totally retribalized world of depth involvements. Through radio, TV and the computer, we are already entering a global theater in which the entire world is a Happening. Our whole cultural habitat, which we once viewed as a mere container of people, is being transformed by these media and by space satellites into a living organism, itself contained within a new macrocosm or connubium of a supraterrestrial nature."

LANGUAGE 'IN OUTLEX'

" The day of the individualist, of privacy, of fragmented or "applied" knowledge, of "points of view" and specialist goals is being replaced by the over-all awareness of a mosaic world in which space and time are overcome by television, jets and computers--a simultaneous, "all-at-once" world in which everything resonates with everything else as in a total electrical field, a world in which energy is generated and perceived not by the traditional connections that create linear, causative thought processes, but by the intervals, or gaps, which Linus Pauling grasps as the languages of cells, and which create synaesthetic discontinuous integral consciousness."

MUD SOMETIMES GIVES THE ILLUSION OF DEPTH ...

MARSHALL MCLUHAN HAS A POSSE

" IN RISU VERITAS " ... "In Laughter there is Truth"

Tony Schwartz + The Responsive Chord

"In watching television, our eyes function like our ears. They never see a picture, just as our ears never hear a word. The process differs from film in that it requires much faster processing of information and more visual recall. With film, the brain has to process 24 distinct inputs per second. With television, the brain has to process thousands of distinct inputs per second. Watching television, the eye is for the first time functioning like the ear. With television, the patterning of auditory and visual stimuli is identical."

POST INFORMATION SOCIETY ?

"The network not only allows for the substantiation of media dopplers/clones/copies of consciousness, it loops their creation to the point where everything which is mediated is subject to this cloning process, infinitely. Hence, the entire world if not the entire universe might have already been cloned. Or, perhaps we are already living in a network which is the product of this process."

French Translation

Wise Guy = Smart Ass

ACTIVE INTERPLAY

"...Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. 'Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village...a simultaneous happening."... "Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay."

" ALL NEWS IS FAKE ! "

“I don’t see any point in making anything but controversial statements..There is no other way of getting attention at all. I mean you cannot get people thinking until you say something that really shocks them; dislocates them.” Marshall McLuhan - EDUCATION IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE, 1970

FIVE BODIES

LAST LINE

"The Bomb is electric software. It inspires nightmares of population explosions in the old nineteenth-century minds. There is no finish line."

- Marshall McLuhan, Culture is our Business, p.334, 1970.

RECREATION

"I have more fun writing in books than I do writing books."

NO FEAR OF FLYING

“Whenever I fly, I always carry a powerful bomb with me. This absolutely insures my safety, the probability of there being two such bombs on the plane being infinitesimally low.”

WHAT IF HE'S RIGHT ?

ANTISTHENES

Q: what learning is most necessary ? Antisthenes : "How to get rid of having anything to unlearn."

"OUTSIDE OF A DOG, A BOOK IS MAN'S BEST FRIEND ...

inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." Groucho Marx

interdisciplinary = the gap is where the action is

Our awareness of the interdisciplinary is curtailed by the institutional organization of social theory which still tends to assume a canon and clear boundaries. Three tasks emerge as urgent issues for social theory : the need to think and feel ambivalence; to track the circulation of anomalies in theoretical texts; and to learn from the fascination with interpretative boundlessness.

DOGGISHNESS

Hello ! My name is Rags ! Woof Woof !

"YOU MISS 100 PER CENT OF THE SHOTS YOU NEVER TAKE."

BLESS ... Art on Ice ! Canada's Gift to International Culture

Kelvin Grad 1928

507 Gertrude, Winnipeg

double blast

Ground Zero : 'Canadian Vorticism' ?

" my canvasses are surrealist ...

... and to call them "theories" is to miss my satirical intent altogether."

AMATEURISM FTW !

"Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialise, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The 'expert' is the man who stays put." - Marshall McLuhan

MEDIA GUIDEBOOK

HOOD ORNAMENT

"The car has lost its place in the heart of the people. That doesn't mean it's going to disappear overnight. Not at all. All it means is the effects of the car are disappearing. And privacy and service environment are part of the effects. When I say the medium is the message, I'm saying that the motor car is not a medium. The medium is the highway, the factories, and the oil companies. That is the medium. In other words, the medium of the car is the effects of the car. When you pull the effects away, the meaning of the car is gone. The car as an engineering object has nothing to do with these effects. The car is a figure in a ground of services. It's when you change the ground that you change the car. The car does not operate as the medium, but rather as one of the major effects of the medium. So 'the medium is the message' is not a simple remark, and I've always hesitated to explain it. It really means a hidden environment of services created by an innovation. And the hidden environment of services is the thing that changes people. It is the environment that changes people, not the technology." - McLuhan, Marshall. UNDERSTANDING ME: Lectures and Interviews. Eds. David Staines and Stephanie McLuhan. Boston: MIT Press, 2003, pp.241-2

MCLUHAN'S WRITE HAND

Margaret Stewart

new war

IDLE MIND

"...the one sin for which there is no forgiveness..."

Doug ... YOU KNOW NOTHING !

DC : " a mile wide and an inch deep "

DOUBLETHINK AS THINK AGAIN

" The misleading effect of books like George Orwell's 1984 is to project into the future a state of affairs that already exists. Such books distract attention from the present actuality."

Winni-pigeon !

"We don't know who discovered water, but it certainly wasn't a fish...."

Letter to Robert J. Leuver July 1969, Letters of Marshall McLuhan, page 384 "There is no harm in reminding ourselves from time to time that the "Prince of this World" is a great P.R. man, a great salesman of new hardware and software, a great electric engineer, and a great master of the media. It is His master stroke to be not only environmental but invisible, for the environmental is invincibly persuasive when ignored."

"All jokes are grievances..."

"To introduce understanding into a somnambulistic society is perhaps a kind of explosive and satirical activity..."

The Winnipeg School of Communications

READING HABITS

THE VESTIBULE TO LSD

PATTERN RECOGNITION + BANALITY

MYTHOLOGICAL BRIDE

" Our technology forces us to live mythically ..."

ZOMBIE STANCE

Because of today's terrific speed-up of information moving, we have a chance to apprehend, predict and influence the environmental forces shaping us--and thus win back control of our own destinies. The new extensions of man and the environment they generate are the central manifestations of the evolutionary process, and yet we still cannot free ourselves of the delusion that it is how a medium is used that counts, rather than what it does to us and with us. This is the zombie stance of the technological idiot. It's to escape this Narcissus trance that I've tried to trace and reveal the impact of media on man, from the beginning of recorded time to the present.

STRANGE FRUIT

unpublished ...

FALSE PROPHET

"We always knew McLuhan was a windbag." Saturday Night May 1988

phonemic trans-formation

WONDER LAND

"When electric technology was new and speculative, Alice in Wonderland came as a kind of non-Euclidean space-time Utopia, a grown-up version of which is the Illuminations of Rimbaud. Like Lewis Carroll, Rimbaud accepts each object as a world and the world as an object. He makes a complete break with the established procedure of putting things into time or space..." MM, Notes on Burroughs

From Cliché to Archetype, page 162

"…paradox equivocates. It lies, and it doesn't. It tells the truth, and it doesn't…The one meaning must always be taken with respect to the other—so that the Liar paradox is, literally, speculative, its meanings infinitely mirrored, infinitely reflected, in each other."

dissolving phantasmagoria

“People who have made no attempt to educate themselves live in a kind of dissolving phantasmagoria of a world”

CUTTING EDGE 1966

ESSAY : Culture and Technology by Marshall McLuhan

NOTA BENE

As Joyce notes in a letter to William Bird, "in sleep our senses are dormant, except the sense of hearing, which is always awake, since you can't close your ears. So any sound that comes to our ears is turned into a dream."

KNOWLEDGE BROKEN : Greek, symballein — to throw together

" [He] changed his procedure from working with a “point of view” to that of the generating of insights by the method of “interface” as it is named in chemistry. “Interface” refers to the interaction of substances in a kind of mutual irritation. In art and poetry this is precisely the technique of “symbolism” (Greek, symballein—to throw together) with its paratactic procedure of juxtaposing without connectives. It is the natural form of conversation or dialogue rather than of written discourse..."

What is it Mister Jones ?

SMALL BRAIN

" It is a mark of a feeble and vulgar mind to be impressed by the size of the solar system and ignore the grandeur of the internal dimensions of moral life and rational free will.” - Marshall McLuhan, “Typhon in America", typescript (I), MS., late Forties, p.68

quote/unquote

What do Alexander the Great and Winnie the Pooh have in common?

They both have the same middle name.

REWIND

"The instant replay is surely one of the greatest art forms of our time."

GOOFY FOOT

"We don't know who discovered surfing but it certainly wasn't a fish."

SPACE THEORY

AN EYE FOR AN EAR

Frontispiece to Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations

blastula ... the site of breakdown as breakthrough

"Time and space died yesterday ... we are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal and omnipresent speed." - Marinetti from Cavell's McLuhan in Space, page 107.

INNER TRIP

"Civilization is entirely the product of phonetic literacy. As it dissolves with the electronic revolution, we rediscover a tribal integral awareness that manifests itself in a complete shift in our sensory lives....This new electronic environment itself constitutes an inner trip, collectively, without benefit of drugs. The impulse to use hallucinogens is a kind of empathy with the electronic environment."

VERBIAGE

“Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind.”

ALL NEWS IS FANTASY AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT

“The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie.”

AUDITORY IMAGINATION : gerard manley hopkins

"Take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right."

PHILOSOPHER'S COUCH : " I do some of my best work lying down."

"As extension of man the chair is a specialist ablation of the posterior, a sort of ablative absolute of backside, whereas the couch extends the integral being"

TRUMP DEW CARD

"Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen."

He was a self-described "gerk gawk"...

... a guy who gives jerks a bad name.

sdrawkcab + forwards

"Albert North Whitehead was fond of saying that the greatest discovery of the nineteenth century was not this or that invention, but the discovery of the technique of invention itself. It is very simple, and was loudly proclaimed by Poe, Baudelaire, and Valery, namely, begin with the solution to the problem, and then find out what steps lead to the solution. In other words, work backwards."

AGAINST THE GRAIN

"The only cool PR is provided by one’s enemies. They toil incessantly and for free"

idiosyncratic coach house file system

Margaret Stewart told me she had made 5 or so books documenting every day at the Coach House from 1963 - May '78 (who came in and every request for MM to speak, etc.) She was very upset for over a decade that they had disappeared. But in the early 90s she told me that she found out that Eric had them.

Look Ma ! I'm a celebrity !

" To reward and make celebrities of artists can be a way of ignoring their prophetic work, and preventing its timely use for survival." - M.M.

THE WORLD IS NEW !

The probe is a means or method of perceiving. It resists any single point of view; it’s a better form than expository prose for examining our time because it works by gaps and interfaces. For instruction, use incomplete knowledge so people can fill things in– they can round it out and fill it in with their own experiences. There’s no participation in just telling: that’s simply for consumers– they sit there and swallow it, or not.

sigh ...

He : " Its simultaneous and everywhereatonce..."She : ( I wish he would stop talking about acoustic space...)

SURVEY SAYS !

24/7 LUCID DREAMTIME

“The discarnate TV user lives in a world between fantasy and dream, and is in a typically hypnotic state, which is the ultimate form and level of participation.”

EGG MANAGEMENT : What's good for M & M Enterprises is good for America.

QUADROPHRENIC POP COMBO

OPEN WIDE

praxis

"Don't tell me what's in the books. I've read them. Tell me what you've learned that you didn't already know.Then, we may both learn something new."

THUNDER MAP

"I knew I shoulda taken that turn at Albuquerquefaititllibum !

Ineluctable Modality of the Visually Impaired

22 eye operations for iritis, glaucoma, and cataracts, sometimes being totally blind for short intervals

MIND THE GAP

After 2500 years of alphabetic and typographic culture, it is not easy for us to adjust suddenly to the non-visual, inner space of the interval and to the ferment of the "interface". ANY SPEED-UP OF INFORMATION OR OF HARDWARE ALTERS THE INTERVALS OF TIME AND SPACE BETWEEN PEOPLE AND EVENTS. It is this world of the interval, and not the world of the "connection" that is decisive in all matters of change.

Everday at 12:10 pm

Saint Basil's Church

BUM TRANSLATION

REPRESENT

It seems to me a book that somebody should have written a century ago ...

"To show by exactly what historical process ["modern man has desacralized his world and assumed a profane existence"] was done is the theme of The Gutenberg Galaxy." McLuhan 1962, p.69( nota bene : working title : The Road to Finnegans Wake )

HAVEN' T - GARDE

PULP NON FICTION

Putting Allspace in a Notshall

Afterpiece when the Royal Revolver of these real globoes lets regally fire of his mio colpo for the chrisman's pandemon to give over and the Harlequinade to begin properly SPQueaRking Mark Time's Finist Joke. Putting Allspace in a Notshall. Well, the slice and veg joint's well in its way, and so is a ribroast and jackknife as sporten dish, but home cooking everytime.

Menippus of Gadara

"Most of my writing is Menippean satire, presenting the actual surface of the world we live in as a ludicrous image."

Business Is Our Culture

"Today the business of business is becoming the constant invention of new business."

SOMETHING ELSE PRESS

Up to this curkscraw bind an admirable verbivocovisual pre sentment of the worldrenownced Caerholme Event has been being given by The Irish Race and World. The huddled and aliven ...

“McLuhan is the Message” TELESCOPE 1967

vicociclometer

LINKED BY TITLE : The new science (Novum Organum) by Francis Bacon, and The new science (Scienza Nuova) by Giambattista Vico : " Our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradomational gazebocroticon, autokinatonetically preprovided with a clappercoupling."

DOKTOR RAUM

Frederick Keisler : 4D

Eeeeeee-lec-tri-ci-teeeeeeee

Singin through you to me;thunderbolts caught easilyShouts the truth peacefullyEeeeeee-lec-tri-ci-teeeeeeee

24 HOUR NEWS CYCLE

"World War III will be a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation."

SCRUTINY

Practical Criticism in Action

ORDER OF CANADA

Winnipigeon makes good !

FAITH BASED TV

Da Capo al Fine

QUASI PARLANDO

see Cavell's McLuhan in Space page 162

INTERMITTENT

"Many a good argument is ruined by some fool who knows what he is talking about."

FIELD MARSHALL

"mosaic or field approach ..."

MORAL ARITHMETIC

MARGIN = 0

post euclidean space

FAIT ACCOMPLI

SECRET HANDSHAKE

"And I sept up twinminsters, the pro and the con, my stavekirks wove so norcely of peeled wands and attachatouchy floodmud, now all loosebrick and stonefest, freely masoned arked for covennanters and shinners' rifuge ... "

Lost In Translation

" the spectacle is the massage ... "

The Biggest Loser

My first TV show idea came back in the early1970s. It was called Up Against the Wall, andwas almost produced. Contestants were tohave explained to the audience how they gotinto a financial pickle. The more entangledtheir financial disaster, the more energeticallythe audience would applaud. At the end ofevery episode, a cheque would be issued tothe most dismal contestant. This emphasis onmisfortune would have been appreciated byadvertisers, since they need a big dose of"bad news" in all programs in order to bal-ance the "good news" in the ads. If TVactually were to broadcast more good news,as some cultural reactionaries want, theadvertising market would collapse, and theensuing economic crisis would probablylead to some sort of popular dictatorship,which they do not want.

PATAPHYSICIAN

" Merdre ! "

HIDDEN GROUND

"The price paid by literate man for ABCED-mindedness is to exist personally and socially in a state of almost total subliminal awareness."

ESSENTIAL BUT OUT OF PRINT !?...

Only 450 out of [possibly] more than 2000 letters written !

EARTH AS ARTFORM

Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed.

The medium is the message ... from Satan

About Me

APPLIED JOYCE

SOUTHERN CONNECTIONS

FOOTPRINTS IN THE SAND OF CRIME

Super Sleuth of Wychwood Park, looking for a clue : " Though he may be more humble, there is no police like Holmes ..."

QUACKERS

STRANGE DUCK

"He was six-feet, two-inches, thin, with a little moustache," she once told a television interviewer. "He was very self-contained and very British, all with this peculiar Canadian accent. I thought he was the strangest duck I'd ever met!"

-Corrine McLuhan

CYNICAL COMMODITY : PROCESSED WORLD

" This time we are in a full universe, a space radiating with power but also cracked, like a shattered windshield still holding together." - Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault

PERCEPT VS CONCEPT

"It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic."

BUFFALO NOTEBOOK

"Scribbledehobble"

Letter to Robert J. Leuver July 1969, Letters of Marshall McLuhan P. 384

"There is no harm in reminding ourselves from time to time that the "Prince of this World" is a great P.R. man, a great salesman of new hardware and software, a great electric engineer, and a great master of the media. It is His master stroke to be not only environmental but invisible, for the environmental is invincibly persuasive when ignored."

UNABOMBER

TECHNOLOGY AS FORBIDDEN FRUIT OF METAPHYSICAL ISOLATION

FIGURE/GROUND = SKULL

Marshall McLuhan has a Posse

McLuhan letter to Prince Bernhard [ May 14, 1969 ]

"As you know, I was a rather bad boy at Bilderberg. Frankly I was staggered at the very low level of awareness of the contemporary world exhibited by all guests present. As my friend Wyndham Lewis, the painter, put it : "The artist is writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person who lives in the present." Ordinary people live thirty years back in a state of of motivated somnambulism. Such was the state of the delegates at Bilderberg. Without a knowledge of all the poets and painters and artists from Baudelaire to Joyce, it is futile to attempt any appraisal of the formal or efficient causes initiated by the evolutionary extensions of our bodies which we call technology."

META APPROACH

"My approach to media is metaphysical rather than sociological or dialectical ... I get such great joy from contemplating the forms of culture ... the language of forms is a source of perpetual joy and discovery that is quite inexhaustible ... I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities."

CAMBRIDGE OARSMAN

Trinity Hall Rowing Team 1934 - 35

RZZZZZZZZ !

Symbolist Poem : " Penguin in bondage ? "

SOUTHPAW WITH PERFECT PITCH

PIED PIPERS ALL BY RENE CERA

Unlike many people on campus at the time, Cera actually understood McLuhan's ideas, interpreting the siren call of television as a frenzied dance of seduction and confusion.

HOLDING THE EYE CLOSED

For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role. Time is still loaded with a thousand decisions and indecisions which terrify a society that has yielded so much of its autonomy to merely automatic processes and routines. The problem, therefore, is to control panic by "killing time" or by shredding it into "ragtime."

Q + A

Q : Do you really believe in life after death ?

MM : Do you really believe there is any life before death ?

"ITS COOL NOT TO SHAVE" - Marshall McLuhan, the Man and his Message - CBC Archives

NEXT EXIT

McLuhan: The new environment of simultaneous and diversified information creates acoustic man. He is surrounded by sound– from behind, from the side, from above. His environment is made up of information in all kinds of simultaneous forms, and he puts on this electrical environment as we put on our clothes, or as the fish puts on water. Acoustic space is created by our ability to hear from all directions at once. Electric information arrives from all quarters at once. Thus, in effect, acoustic environments were created by the telegraph and began to show up in the press as mosaics of juxtaposed and discontinuous items all under one dateline. Acoustic space is all touch and interplay, all resonance and sympathy. Acoustic space is like the relationship of mother and child, which is audile-tactile, sound and touch. The cooing and handling and touching– this is the kind of world the electric media put around us. The electric media are a mom-and-child or rock-and-roll relationship. The acoustic or simultaneous space in which we now live is like a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose margins are nowhere. Acoustic space cannot be cut up into pieces, as visual space can. It is both compressed and indivisible.

TECHNOLOGY AND POLITICAL CHANGE, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL, Vol.7, Summer, 1952, pp.189-95

"It would be too much in the spirit of the current effect of the new media to brand these and allied developments as deplorable. For, if the new reality of our time is in the main a collective dream or nightmare brought about by the mechanization of speech (television takes the final step of mechanizing the expressiveness of the human figure and gesture) then we must learn the art of using all our wits in a dream world, as did James Joyce in FINNEGANS WAKE."

Q & A

Q – Do you consider yourself an artist?MM – Entirely. Always have been. Nothing else.Q – Then why the doctorate and academe?MM – I have never attempted to win the respect of my colleagues. I go against the grain.Q – If people accept your insights?MM – I would panic. I would assume they lost their noodle.

MM effectively concludes the interview,going on to note that so long as he is violently disapproved of, "I am on the right course."

BOTTOM LINE : ARTIST + POET

SHE GOT A TV EYE ON ME

"Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition."

"Copyright is impossible, even ridiculous, under electric conditions."

Hallucinating Idiot

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there."

"To introduce understanding into a somnambulistic society is perhaps a kind of explosive and satirical activity. But the public has its revenge. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is regarded as a hallucinated idiot."

GROWING UP ABSURD

NO BODY, NO NATURAL LAW, NO GRAVITY, NO MORALS

McLuhan: " I never make any value judgement. On the other hand, if you want me to make my personal preferences explicit, I would certainly wish to get rid of electricity. Because I know at the speed of light, Western man cannot continue to exist without a body. Because when you do not have a body, you have no natural law, there is no gravity, no morals. Electronic man has no morals."

THE WORD MAKES THE MARKET

A Media Approach to Inflation, September 21, 1974

LETTERS, To Ezra Pound, June 22nd 1951 page 227

"In a mindless age every insight takes on the character of a leathal weapon."

2. Burroughs uses what he calls “Brion Gysin’s cut-up method which I call the fold-in method.” To read the daily newspaper in its entirety is to encounter the method in all its purity. Similarly, an evening watching television programs is an experience in a corporate form — an endless succession of impressions and snatches of narrative. Burroughs is unique only in that he is attempting to reproduce in prose what we accommodate every day as a commonplace aspect of life in the electric age. If the corporate life is to be rendered on paper, the method of discontinuous nonstory must be employed.

we live science fiction !

" The future ain't what it used to be ! "

" Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin' ? "

McLUHAN: Sometimes I wonder. I'm making explorations. I don't know where they're going to take me. My work is designed for the pragmatic purpose of trying to understand our technological environment and its psychic and social consequences. But my books constitute the process rather than the completed product of discovery; my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of insight, of pattern recognition, rather than to use them in the traditional and sterile sense of classified data, categories, containers. I want to map new terrain rather than chart old landmarks.

But I've never presented such explorations as revealed truth. As an investigator, I have no fixed point of view, no commitment to any theory -- my own or anyone else's. As a matter of fact, I'm completely ready to junk any statement I've ever made about any subject if events don't bear me out, or if I discover it isn't contributing to an understanding of the problem. The better part of my work on media is actually somewhat like a safe-cracker's. I don't know what's inside; maybe it's nothing. I just sit down and start to work. I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences -- until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.

CLASSIFICATION

"Classification makes some people feel more secure. It seems to relieve them of any further need for study."

McLuhan to Wilfred Watson, 4 October 1964

Talk about blind spots in regions of maximal impact! Looking at The Diabolical Principle just now I read loud and clear that art must be totally environmental. It must be the content of nothing whatever. Ergo, the VORTEX = the totally environmental .… Lewis wants nothing less for Art than the power to create total environments for Life and Death. There must be no art as content of some other set of skills or interest.…I find it a bit staggering to confront Lewis as a man who really wanted to be Pontifex maximus of a magical priesthood. I suppose Yeats, Joyce and Pound had similar aspirations. Their priesthood was to create new worlds of perception. They were to be world engineers who shaped the totality of human awareness. Their pigments and materials were not to be paint or words but all the resources of the age. Such were the Pharaohs. They made of the world a perception Lab .… The mode of great Art. The environment as ultimate artefact.

PAGE 69

Finnegans Wake: Page 69 Part:1 Episode:3 Page:69 not, has been the expression, direct or through an agent male, of womanhid offended, (ah! ah!), has not levy of black mail from the times the fairies were in it, and fain for wilde erthe blothoms followed an impressive private reputation for whispered sins? Now by memory inspired, turn wheel again to the whole of the wall. Where Gyant Blyant fronts Peannlueamoore There was once upon a wall and a hooghoog wall a was and such a wallhole did exist. Ere ore or ire in Aaarlund. Or you Dair's Hair or you Diggin Mosses or your horde of orts and oriorts to garble a garthen of Odin and the lost paladays when all the eddams ended with aves. Armen? The doun is theirs and still to see for menags if he strikes a lousaforitch and we'll come to those baregazed shoeshines if you just shoodov a second. And let oggs be good old gaggles and Isther Estarr play Yesther Asterr. In the drema of Sorestost Areas, Diseased. A stonehinged gate then was for another thing while the suroptimist had bought and enlarged that shack under fair rental of one yearlyng sheep, (prime) value of sixpence, and one small yearlyng goat (cadet) value of eightpence, to grow old and happy (hogg it and kidd him) for the reminants of his years; and when everything was got up for the purpose he put an applegate on the place by no means as some pretext a bedstead in loo thereof to keep out donkeys (the pigdirt hanging from the jags to this hour makes that clear) and just thenabouts the iron gape, by old custom left open to prevent the cats from getting at the gout, was triplepatlockt on him on purpose by his faithful poorters to keep him inside probably and possibly enaunter he felt like sticking out his chest too far and tempting gracious providence by a stroll on the peoplade's eggday, unused as he was yet to being freely clodded. O, by the by, lets wee brag of praties, it ought to be always remembered in connection with what has gone before that there was a northroomer, Herr Betreffender, out for his zimmer holedigs, digging in number 32 at the Rum and Puncheon (Branch of Dirty Dick's free house) in Laxlip (where the Sockeye Sammons were stopping at the time orange fasting) prior to that, a Kommerzial (Gorbotipacco, he was wreaking like Zentral Oylrubber)

CAUSES in the numbness itself, not in the media figures

"So extraordinary is this unawareness that it is what needs to be explained. The transforming power of media is easy to explain, but the ignoring of this power is not at all easy to explain (p.304)... Examination of the origin and development of the individual extensions of man should be preceded by a look at some general aspects of the media, or extensions of man, beginning with the never-explained numbness that each extension brings about in the individual and society." (p.6)